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THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 




LORD NELSON 



THE BRITISH NAVY 
AT WAR 



' BY 

W. MACNEILE DIXON 

Professor in the University of Glasgow 



9J* 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Jibe fltocreibc prca* CambriDgr 

1917 






Gilt 

DEC S Wt 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

For a number of descriptive quotations in the following 
pages I am indebted to the correspondence columns of the 
Times, and to articles in the Cornhill and other magazines. 
I have also to acknowledge with best thanks permission 
to use plans of the Falklands battle and of the engagement 
between the Sydney and the Emden which appeared in 
the Times. 

W. M. D. 



CONTENTS 

I. The War at Sea and Its New Problems — German 
Tactics i 

II. The First Phase — The Heligoland Action — 

Germany's Fleet in Being 7 

III. The Ocean Battles — Coronel — The Falkland 

Isles 15 

IV. North Sea Battles — The Dogger Bank — Jut- 

land 27 

V. The Submarine Menace — The Work of British 

Submarines 44 

VI. Blockade and Bombardment 54 

VII. Single Ship Actions — Sailors and Seamanship . 63 

VIII. Bridging the Seas 73 

IX. Navies and Armies — What the British Navy has 

DONE FOR THE WORLD 82 

APPENDIX 

German Colonial Possessions surrendered to the 
Allies since August, 1914 91 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Lord Nelson Frontispiece 

Admiral Sir John R. Jellicoe, G.C.B., G.C.V.O. . . i 

Admiral Sir David Beatty, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., D.S.O. . 4 

Map of the World showing Ocean Battles and Ger- 
many's lost Colonial Possessions 8 

Commodore Tyrwhitt 10 

Two Views of Heligoland 12 

Admiral Craddock 18 

Battle of the Falkland Isles (plan) 20 

Admiral Sturdee 22 

Firing A Salvo 24 

Map of the North Sea 28 

Battle of Jutland (plan) 32 

The British Fleet at Sea 36 

Rear-Admiral the Hon. Horace L. A. Hood, C.B., M.V.O., 

D.S.O 40 

Submarine C 34 coming into port 44 

Looking through the Periscope of a Submarine . . 46 

A Submarine's Foremost Torpedo Tubes .... 50 

Lieutenant-Commander Horton 56 

Map of the Dardanelles 58 „ 

1 1. M.S. Cornwallis Firing at the Turks in the 

Mountains 60 

iz 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Engagement between H.M.A.S. Sydney and the Emden 
(plan) 64 

A Floating Dry-Dock 68 

Sentinels of the Empire: Naval Guns .... 76 

A Blue-jacket inside the Muzzle of a i 5-inch Gun 
on Board H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth 84 




Photograph by J. Russell £s Sons, Soulhsea 

ADMIRAL SIR JOHN JELLICOE, G.C.B., G.C.V.O. 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

CHAPTER I 

THE WAR AT SEA AND ITS NEW PROBLEMS — 
GERMAN TACTICS 

At the outbreak of war Britain was not altogether un- 
prepared: she was superior to her enemy on the sea. But 
she was none the less faced by grave anxieties. The days 
of Trafalgar, her last great naval engagement, lay far in 
the past, and, however glorious her sea traditions, vic- 
tories a hundred years ago afford no guarantee of victories 
in the present. Empires majestic as her own, founded, as 
it had once seemed, upon rock, — Assyria, Greece, Tyre, 
Carthage, Rome itself, — had gone down into the dust, 
and who could affirm that Britain's hour had not struck? 
Britons, indeed, were confident that even if Fortune proved 
a fickle jade, the Fates themselves might shrink from the 
resistance of the grim old lion of the sea. They were con- 
scious, too, that it was a splendid quarrel in which to win 
or lose, a quarrel great as "ever the sword had pleaded or 
trumpet had proclaimed," and that if their country's day 
were done, a noble cause would at least make noble the 
last chapter of her history. Still no prophet could forecast 
the issue of the struggle or attempt to picture the coming 
scenes of the imperial drama. Since Nelson's day, if not 
all, almost all, the conditions of warfare on the sea had 
been transformed. Problems hardly yet stated confronted 

i 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

the British admirals. Wood and rope and sail had been re- 
placed by steel and steam. The speed of ships, the range 
of guns, the defensive armour, the offensive weapons, all 
were changed. A single gun from a super-dreadnought 
to-day discharges a greater weight of metal in a single shot 
than the whole broadside of a hundred guns on Nelson's 
flagship. The fleets opposed to them, upon which Ger- 
many had expended £300,000,000, were, moreover, next 
to their own the most powerful in the world, composed of 
the most formidable modern vessels, equipped with every 
engine of destruction the wit of man could devise, and 
manned by experienced, skilled, and resolute seamen. 
Science had almost exhausted itself in their construction. 
Her adversary was certainly not to be despised. Naval 
warfare, too, is full of surprises. The chance of battle, a 
single mistake on the part of one of her admirals, might 
eliminate Britain's superiority in capital ships, a second 
might spell her ruin. Upon the shoulders of Sir John Jelli- 
coe lay a responsibility the heaviest, beyond all argument, 
that any sailor, not excepting Nelson himself, had ever 
borne, for without doubt the magnitude of the operations 
which faced the British Navy was utterly without prece- 
dent. It had not merely to deal with the German High 
Seas Fleet, if opportunity offered, and in any case, and at 
all hazards, to watch and contain it, but at the same time 
to provide for a hundred contingencies, to establish a 
blockade of enemy ports, to keep an eye on vessels under 
other flags, to hunt down Germany's swift commerce raid- 
ers at large in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, to conduct 



THE WAR AT SEA 

vast operations in the Eastern Mediterranean; all this 
and more — to cover the transport of soldiers, literally in 
millions, from Canada, from India, from Australia, from 
Britain to every zone of war, France, Egypt, Turkey; and 
of munitions and supplies not alone for these but for her 
allies to Russian and Italian ports. A never-ending pro- 
cession of troop-ships, munition-ships, passenger-ships, 
merchant-ships, whole armies coming and going upon the 
seven seas — ninety-two transports conveyed the Indian, 
thirty-two the Canadian, troops, how many have crossed 
from Britain to France, from France to Britain, or down 
the busy street of the Mediterranean since August, 19 14? 
— and all these with hardly a thought of Germany and 
the second most powerful navy ever built ! 

"I consider," said Admiral Hornby, "that I have com- 
mand of the sea when I am able to tell my Government 
that they can move an expedition to any point without 
fear of interference." Such is Sir John Jellicoe's position 
to-day. Consider now the scale of these early operations. 
It is unheard of, fabulous, unimaginable, the miracle, not 
that inevitable mistakes were made, but that this stupen- 
dous thing was possible at all in the face of such opposi- 
tion as Germany, putting forth all her strength, was pre- 
pared to offer and did offer. Hardly, then, can one say 
that the great glory of Britain's achievement in this war 
is to be found in the spectacular events, the hours of actual 
battle, thrilling though they be; rather is it to be found in 
three invisible things, the organization that supported so 
gigantic a super-structure, the resourceful skill with which 

3 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

the altogether novel problems were met and solved, and 
the superb spirit, which burned and burns like an unquench- 
able flame, in the breasts of the British seamen themselves. 
Amid all the changes since Drake's or Nelson's day, that 
remained unchanged. You may very properly point out 
that in respect of some of these undertakings Great Brit- 
ain had the support of gallant and powerful allies, France, 
Italy, Russia, Japan. It is true, and to these allies, no one 
— least of all Englishmen — will deny unstinted admira- 
tion and praise. Yet these nations will themselves acknowl- 
edge that in the major operations, and at the point of 
chief est hazard, the nerve centre of the North Sea and 
the English Channel, the strain has rested wholly on the 
Grand Fleet and its auxiliaries. 

What, now, is the outstanding fact of the whole naval 
war, which governs all others and gives its character to 
the situation from first to last? It is the unwilling and 
tacit, but the full, acceptance by Germany, with all the strategy 
and tactics involved in the admission, of her naval inferiority. 
Before a blow was struck she accepted the position of the 
weaker power, framed her plans and made her dispositions 
in the light of it. That estimate of the position was just, 
wise, intelligible, and the measures which flowed from it 
logical and beyond criticism. The vapourings in the Ger- 
man press, the inability of German admirals, after pro- 
longed and anxious searches, to discover the British fleet, 
the joyful announcements of victory, the flags, and compli- 
ments and speeches had all no doubt their calculated value. 
"Make-Believe" is a good game and Germans play it 

4 




lDMIRAL SIR DAVID BEATTY, K.C.B., K.CVO D.S.O 



THE WAR AT SEA 

well. But the high naval command, Admirals von Schccr 
and von Schipper, have no illusions, they know where Sir 
David Bcatty is to be found on any day and at any hour. 
But they know, too, that a living dog is better than a dead 
lion, and a llect afloat than a fleet submerged. Inferiority, 
unless the gods directly intervene, spells ruin in a great 
engagement, and Germany has put her trust, and she was 
right, in harassing tactics, in attempts to deal unexpected 
blows, in efforts to reduce the indisputable superiority of 
her foe by submarine attacks, to lure pursuing squadrons 
into mine fields or to cut off scouting cruisers by concen- 
trations of superior strength. These are the tactics of the 
weaker power; they lead to small, they may lead, with 
assistance of fortune, to considerable, successes. They fail 
only in one particular, they cannot compass a victory. 

The situation which within twenty-four hours the Brit- 
ish Navy established remains, unchanged, the situation 
to-day. A single sentence covers it; the British ships, 
whether men-of-war or merchantmen, are upon the sea, 
the German in their ports. Nowhere, perhaps, was the 
supreme significance of their inconspicuous, their silent, 
presence and pressure immediately realized. Guileless 
men were heard to ask the question, "What is the British 
Navy doing?" For many months neither in Germany nor 
among neutral states did uninstructed opinion clearly per- 
ceive that the key of the whole European situation, mili- 
tary as well as naval, lay in the keeping of that invisible 
fleet, that the great arc of the Allies' communications from 
north to south, vital to all their efforts, depended upon its 

5 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

efficiency and upon its efficiency alone, that it was, too, the 
band of encircling steel destined in the end to strangle by 
its unremitting pressure the strength and resources of the 
Central Powers. Slow in its working, sea power must, in 
a protracted struggle, prove decisive. 

If now we summarize the work of the British Navy in 
the present war, four headings will suffice : — 

1. Battle, either with the enemy's Grand Fleet or with 
subsidiary squadrons or commerce raiders. 

2. Blockade, including the capture of enemy merchant- 
ships on the high seas. 

3. Bombardment, or assistance in combined naval and 
military operations. 

4. Bridging the seas, keeping open, that is, a secure line 
of communications behind the league-long battle 
front of the Allied armies. 

All its multitudinous activities may be ranged under 
this comprehensive scheme. Each in itself came, of course, 
vividly before the riveted gaze of the world only as scene 
succeeded scene in the amazing drama. The opening phase 
of the struggle, for the most part confined to minor opera- 
tions in the North Sea, — preliminary steps of contending 
boxers who spar for a position and an opening, — was 
mainly an affair of submarines and mines. Some stirring 
events, however, belong to the first months of war, the 
chief of these the action off Heligoland on August 28, the 
battle of Coronel, and the engagement which may be said 
to have rung down the curtain on the first act — the battle 
of the Falkland Isles. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FIRST PHASE — THE HELIGOLAND ACTION 
— GERMANY'S FLEET IN BEING 

With her Grand Fleet sentenced to inactivity within 
its canals and land-locked harbours, her merchant navy 
captured or driven from the seas, — over half a million 
tons of German shipping was captured in the first month 
of hostilities, in two months over a million tons, — Ger- 
many was already in evil case. Samoa taken by the New 
Zealand expedition, and Neu Pommern in the Bismarck 
Archipelago by an Australian, were early lost to her, 
the wireless stations in Togoland, South-West Africa, the 
Caroline Islands in the Pacific, and German New Guinea, 
all went the way of her stricken raiders. 

In August, 1914, Germany had numerous fast vessels on 
the ocean routes, but she could not maintain them. Like 
the hundred-handed giant of the old fables, the British 
Navy, bestriding the world, destroyed them in their far- 
separated hunting-grounds. The Kaiser Wilhelm der 
Grosse was the first victim, sunk by the Highflyer off the 
Cape Verde Islands, on August 30, 1914. Next the Cap 
Trafalgar, after a duel with the Carmania, went down in 
the South Atlantic on September 14. The Spreewald was 
captured in the same month by the Berwick in the North 
Atlantic. Then it was the Emden's turn, by far the most 
successful raider, whose skilful handling under Von M Ciller 

7 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

aroused considerable admiration in Britain. The Kaiser 
had just despatched his congratulations to the town of 
Emden on "its God-child in the Indian Ocean" when the 
end came and she was battered to a wreck by the Sydney 
off the Cocos Keelings on November 10. On December 8 
Von Spee's powerful squadron ran into Sturdee at the 
Falklands, and that day's fighting disposed of the Scharn- 
horst, the Gneisenau, the Niirnberg, and the Leipzig. On 
March 14 of the following year the Dresden was destroyed 
off Juan Fernandez by the Kent and the Glasgow. The 
Prinz Eitel Friederich, no longer able to keep the seas, 
retired to Newport News and was interned there on April 
8. The Karlsruhe's fate remains unknown; she vanished, 
possibly in a storm, and ceased to trouble the world's com- 
merce. The Konigsberg ran and hid herself amid the trees 
of a tropical African forest, but perished there, in the Ru- 
figi River, under the guns of monitors on July II, 1915, and 
the game was at an end. Soon, too, since the Fatherland 
could send them no assistance, the greater German colo- 
nies began to fall like ripe fruit from the shaken tree. After 
the Falklands battle the guerre de course collapsed, and 
before five months were over Germany's zone of naval 
warfare was restricted to the Baltic and the North Sea, 
except for the operation of submarines here and there in 
bursts of brief activity. In this early part of the war she 
had, however, one great and startling success against war- 
vessels, which brought sharply to the attention of Britain 
and the world in general the destructive power of this 
venomous type of craft. A single submarine under Von 




ch Aug 26, 1914- 

Aug 29,1914 

.. .Sept. 21, 1914 

mrendered to British.. Sept 24 t 19(4 
,, « ., July 9, 1915 

-♦, .«».... „ Sept. 4,1916 

jn Governor and 

Territory Feb 16, 1916 



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THE DESTRUCTION OF GERMAN COMMERCE RAIDERS 
0L0N1AL PO SSESSIONS SURRENDERED TO THE ALLIES SINCE AUGUST 1914- 



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For t/ie complete list of German Colonial 
Possessions surrendered to the Allies since 
ifrc outbreak of War see Appendix 



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® Samoa „... „.-...*,._ Aug.29,1914 

® Bismarck Archipelago „„ u „ .Sept.21, 1914 

© German New Guinea and Solomon Islands surrendered to British. .Sept. 24, 1914 

(|) German South West Africa „,, « ./ duly 9,1915 

© Dar-es- Salaam.-. ft .... 4h */ Sept. 4, 1916 

@ Kamerun No formal surrender, but German Governor and 

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THE FIRST PHASE 

Wcddingen disposed within half an hour of the cruisers, 
Aboukir, Hoguc, and Cressy, ships of considerable value, 
though somewhat old and slow. The policy of patrolling 
a submarine area with such vessels was, of course, a mis- 
take for which Britain paid dearly. She learned her lesson, 
however, or rather lessons : that patrol work should be con- 
ducted with small, swift craft, that ships in the vicinity 
must not slow down for the sake of rescue, as the Cressy 
and the Hogue did, — an act, prompted, indeed, by hu- 
manity, but indefensible in modern war, — and that the 
submarine must be seriously reckoned with in all future op- 
erations. No comparable success was ever again achieved. 
Neutrals, too, now began to suffer from the hidden dan- 
gers of warfare in the new and stealthy style. Dutch and 
Danish vessels were early sunk by mines in the North Sea, 
the first American ship in the melancholy list being the 
Evelyn, of 3000 tons, off Borkum. A few shots were ex- 
changed in the early weeks between destroyers; then, on 
August 28, the "certain liveliness" announced by the Brit- 
ish Admiralty culminated in a pretty little engagement 
off the north of Heligoland and at times within sight of its 
defences. 

No one who has any experience of working a small ves- 
sel in the North Sea but is aware of its vileness. There is 
little there of glamour, of Mediterranean colour or of ocean 
splendour. Shallow and therefore abominable to sailors, 
the short, sharp waves, when a small ship is moving at any 
speed, keep the decks a welter of water. "We never steam 
less than twenty knots," wrote the officer of a destroyer, 

9 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

"and you know what that means when there is even a 
small sea running. Choked with oil-fuel smoke, slashed 
with icy spray, soaked to the skin, freezing and utterly 
miserable, the spirit of our men is simply beyond all 
praise." 

Visited, summer and winter, by wet and dreary mists, 
navigation on that grey region is always difficult, and in 
war-time friend is often hardly distinguishable from foe. 

In true North Sea hazy weather with the "low visibil- 
ity" of which one hears so often, the action in the Bight 
took place. Heligoland, ceded by Lord Salisbury to Ger- 
many, has been converted by that power to important 
naval ends. Heavily fortified at a cost of £10,000,000 and 
armed with eleven-inch guns, it thrusts a threatening 
wedge deep into the North Sea, protects the "wet tri- 
angle" behind which lie the chief German naval ports, 
provides useful shelter, an anchorage for warships, a har- 
bour or base for submarines, destroyers, or Zeppelins, and 
a telegraphic outpost for signals. The Bight itself forms a 
channel about eighteen miles in width, through which lies 
the course for vessels from the Elbe bound to the north. 
In this area the British Admiral arranged a rendezvous. 
Picture the saucy Arethusa stealing through the haze, 
with her grey sea-dogs, the destroyers, in attendance. 
Darker patches appear in the mist — cruisers? — de- 
stroyers? — enemy or British? A few moments' observa- 
tion and the guns open fire. 

When the range reached the two thousand yards mark the 
forward six-inch gun of the British cruiser spoke [says one who 

10 




COMMODORE I \ l<\\ 111 II' 



THE FIRST PHASE 

was there], — a short, sharp crack that hurt the cars, followed by 
the duller boom of the bursting shell. It was a fitting beginning 
for the inferno of noise that immediately followed. It was a fight 
in the dark where no man could see how his brother fared and when 
it was only just possible to make out the opposing grey shadow, 
and hammer, hammer, hammer at it till the eyes ached and 
smarted, and the breath whistled through lips parched with the 
acrid, stifling fumes of picric acid. 

Another German cruiser came up and, ranging by her partner, 
added to the rain of shells bursting around and upon the strug- 
gling Arcthusa, till, with all save one of her guns silenced, she 
stood out of the fight for a moment to regain breath. Neither 
of the enemy's cruisers followed, for both had had all they wanted. 
Fifty-five strenuous minutes, then, with the wreckage cleared 
away, the wounded carried below and her guns again fit for action, 
the Arethusa came back for more. Into the haze she steamed, 
seeking her old opponents, found them, and redoubled her pre- 
vious efforts. A very few minutes sufficed this time. One of the 
cruisers burst into llame, the other was visibly sinking. 

To understand such an affair as this, we must have some 
acquaintance with the aims and plans of the attacking 
squadron. Naturally, however, the British Admiralty has 
not disclosed them. But one perceives clearly enough that 
something in the nature of a raid or reconnaissance in force 
was intended, whereby enemy light cruisers and destroy- 
ers scouting in the neighbourhood of Heligoland might be 
cut off from their base and destroyed. If supported by 
heavier vessels speeding to their rescue, Sir David Beatty's 
battle-cruisers were prepared to deal with them. These 
tactics, old as the game of war itself, obtrude themselves 
in every phase of the North Sea operations, German and 
English. You bait your trap with a small vessel or two, a 
larger squadron in wait to pounce upon pursuers. The 

II 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

enemy reinforces or retires and the opening moves may or 
may not lead to a decisive action. 

Fought in thick weather and over a wide expanse of 
water, the Heligoland battle resolved itself largely into a 
series of separate encounters. Enemy vessels loomed up 
through the haze, were engaged, disappeared. Destroyer 
met destroyer, or cruiser met cruiser. German submarines 
attempted unsuccessfully to torpedo the larger ships. A 
confused series of combats ended with the arrival of the 
great vessels, the Lion, the Invincible, the New Zealand, 
the Queen Mary, their high speed, "the use of the helm," 
and the smooth sea making it easy to avoid the German 
submarines, and the overwhelming force drove the enemy 
into the nearest shelter. "We saw the Mainz," wrote an 
officer, "just before she sank, though we did not know at 
the time who she was. It was impossible to recognize her, 
as she had only one battered funnel left, the stump of one 
mast, and was heavily on fire. ... I also saw the Koln sink 
after being smashed up by the whole battle-cruiser fleet. 
She was a worse wreck than the Mainz, I think, though 
she was so badly on fire that she was at times almost com- 
pletely enveloped in smoke." The result of the action was 
the loss to Germany of three light cruisers, two destroyers, 
and perhaps twelve hundred men; the British losses were 
sixty-nine men. Among the prisoners, some hundreds, 
rescued by the British, was the son of Admiral von Tir- 
pitz himself. 

This was the action in which the destroyer Liberty, 
thirsting for more than her due share of glory, actually 

12 







Phtltfrafhi hi Phtfihnm C» . 

TWO VIEWS OF HELIGOLAND 



THE FIRST PHASE 

dashed under the very forts of Heligoland to torpedo, if 
fortune held, the cruisers lying in the harbour under the 
eleven-inch guns. The shells fired at her might have sunk 
a fleet. When only one torpedo was left, and one round 
of ammunition, she thought it time to come away! As 
she swept round, a shell killed her commander and three 
others, but the lieutenant took charge and brought her 
proudly home. Thus men to-day shame the heroes of the 
ancient tales. 

This smart and dashing little action in the dim weather 
illustrates many of the features of modern naval warfare. 
Fought at the utmost speed of the vessels engaged, at per- 
haps the distance of a couple of miles, or, if between larger 
ships, of as much as eight or ten, to find and keep the 
range in a modern engagement provides a dozen problems. 
Your first shot falls short and to the right; you "lengthen " 
and "correct" and your second goes too far or to the left. 
But you have your "bracket" and the third or fourth 
should find the target. Unhappily a turn of the wheel and 
the enemy sheers to port or starboard, altering her dis- 
tance, and the range has again to be found. These darting 
shapes, moving with the rapidity of fast trains, have no 
mind to be caught and held under fire. Constant zigzag- 
ging under fire, turning away, — that is, a point or per- 
haps two points, — when the enemy has found the range, 
is now a feature of all naval engagements. Remember, 
too, that the gun is laid upon a swinging platform which, 
in the chop or roll of the sea, dances with its motion, and 
that to "spot" the shell — its splash if short or over — 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

amid the surf churned by the wind and the opposing ves- 
sel's speed into perpetual foam, is as essential as to dis- 
charge it. With spray and smoke, or both, the gunner has 
constantly to contend. If the position to leeward of the 
enemy's line gives the advantage that gun-laying is not 
interfered with by your own smoke, something of a bal- 
ance is established by the inconvenience, from which the 
weather position is free, of continual driving spray which 
obscures the gun sights. Armchair gunnery is simpler. 

"The advantage of time and place in all martial ac- 
tions," said Drake, "is half victory." That half victory has 
in almost every engagement between the rival fleets lain 
with the Germans. In the Bight of Heligoland, as off the 
Jutland Bank, the British ships fought far from their bases 
in enemy waters and exposed to special dangers, their an- 
tagonists within sight, one might say, of their permanent 
defences. A port under one's lee is a great encouragement 
to face the gale, but the British Navy always fights off the 
enemy's coast. No one can blame the German caution, 
nor the policy upon which it rests. For what alternative is 
open to the weaker power? Germany still adheres to the 
doctrine of a fleet in being, that is, an alert and threatening 
fleet, which, though it may never strike, keeps the weapon 
uplifted, and by its very menace, if it cannot destroy, can 
at least impede, constrain, and distract from other pur- 
poses the enemy's superior but fettered forces. 



CHAPTER III 

THE OCEAN BATTLES — CORONEL — THE 
FALKLANDS 

The presence of swift enemy cruisers on the ocean routes 
constituted indisputably the gravest danger to the trad- 
ing- and passenger-vessels of the Alliance. Great Britain, 
therefore, whose shipping trade — three quarters of the 
whole world's — was particularly exposed to heavy losses 
from raiders, found heiself called upon to police — and 
none will call it an easy matter — all the waters under 
heaven, from east to west and from pole to pole. A few 
days before the outbreak of war — a nicely judged man- 
oeuvre — Admiral von Spee, in command of the German 
fleet in China, disappeared into the ocean silences. For 
some time his movements remained a mystery, but his 
ships were soon to be heard of. Once at sea he detached 
from his squadron the Emden, which set about her work 
in the Indian seas, the Leipzig and the Niirnberg, which 
sailed for the West Coast of America, and with his more 
powerful vessels, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, 
himself made haste to the Pacific. Raids on British mer- 
chantmen had always formed part of the German scheme 
of naval war, and great hopes were entertained of its suc- 
cess. Despite the size of her own fleet and the assistance 
admirably rendered by her allies, Britain's necessities at 
home made it impossible to spare immediately scores of 

15 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

vessels for service in pursuing the raiders, and not until 
mischief enough had been wrought were the hunters suc- 
cessful in tracking and striking down their quarry. By 
means of German traders, who found means even in war- 
time to secure for him the necessary fuel, Von Spee re- 
newed his supplies and kept his bunkers full of coal. Fi- 
nally he affected a strong concentration of five cruisers 
with attendant colliers at Valparaiso. 

It was imperative in British interests that Von Spee's 
career should a's speedily as possible be cut short. What 
forces were present in that area to accomplish this task? 
They consisted of Admiral Craddock's squadron of three 
armoured ships, the Good Hope, his flagship, the Mon- 
mouth, and the Glasgow; the first-named a large cruiser 
capable of twenty-three knots speed, and armed with two 
9.2-inch guns of an old pattern, together with a secondary 
battery of sixteen six-inch guns; the Monmouth of equal 
speed carried no heavy guns, but had fourteen six-inch 
weapons; the Glasgow, a faster vessel, was but weakly 
armed with two six-inch guns. An armed liner of no fight- 
ing value against warships, the Otranto, accompanied the 
cruisers, and the Canopus, whose armament included four 
twelve-inch weapons, was on her way to join the squadron. 
Against the German lighter cruisers, therefore, Craddock 
was well prepared, but should he encounter in addition the 
Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, new and heavily armoured 
ships carrying 8.2-inch guns of the newest style, his case 
was perilous. For two points must here be borne in mind; 
the first that the mere size of a gun is not sufficient to at- 

16 



THE OCEAN BATTLES 

test its destructive power, its age and pattern must also be 
considered; the second that six-inch guns on the lower 
deck, such as were carried by the Good Hope and the Mon- 
mouth, may prove of little service in a heavy sea. There is 
no doubt the British Admiralty had anxieties about Crad- 
dock, recognized the danger in which he stood, and to meet 
it sent the Canopus to strengthen him. But this ship, even 
had she arrived in time, could have brought with her no 
addition to his fighting strength. Modern actions are 
fought at high speed, and the Canopus, built in 1899, was 
probably capable of no more than fifteen knots. Her lame- 
ness saved her, and at a later date debarred her from any 
share in the Falkland battle. During the whole period of 
her cruise she remained a negligible quantity. In defence 
of the British Admiralty it must be remembered that the 
war was still in its earliest stage, the new and splendid ves- 
sels since added to the navy not yet in commission, and 
the need in home waters imperative for an unquestionable 
superiority against the German High Seas Fleet, which 
might on any day or hour make its appearance in force. 
There the chief danger lay, and to detach powerful units 
for operations in the far seas appeared at the moment 
too risky a policy. 

So the scales of fate descended against Admiral Crad- 
dock, who, sailing north from the Horn, on Sunday, No- 
vember 1, ran with his three cruisers into Von Spec's 
squadron of five, off Coroncl, on the coast of Chili. It was 
an evil day, an angry gale rising, and a heavy sea already 
running with a prospect of worse. Five o'clock in the after- 

17 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

noon found the British Admiral — who signalled the Cano- 
pus, still far to the south, "I am going to engage enemy 
now" — steaming on a parallel course with the German 
fleet and distant from it about twelve miles. On sighting 
the British, Von Spee had shifted his helm, swung round 
to the south, and drew in toward the high land. The 
weather had grown steadily worse and was now of the wild- 
est, the wind of almost hurricane force, the evening draw- 
ing in as the great warships tore through the storm amid 
the throbbing of their own engines and the roar of furious 
seas, which poured in cataracts of foam over the plunging 
bows. The German Admiral's skilful manoeuvre in sheer- 
ing under the mountainous coast gave him the advantage 
of position. His own vessels hardly visible against the 
land made a poor target for the English guns, his enemies 
were silhouetted in the last level rays of an angry sunset. 
Never was naval battle fought in the midst of such war- 
ring elements, or in such a theatre of gloom. The frown- 
ing sky, the high and threatening coast, the shrieking 
gale and thundering seas matched well the raging guns 
and the feverish energies of men engaged in the mad 
orgy of battle. The decision came swiftly. Before ten 
minutes were past and after the third broadside the 
Monmouth staggered out of the line, reeling and in 
flames. She struggled bravely back again only to re- 
ceive more shattering wounds. Soon the Good Hope, 
too, was aflame and out of control. Before the action 
had lasted three quarters of an hour a terrifying explosion 
signalled her end. The Monmouth, hardly more than a 

18 




ADMIRA1 SIR I CR Ujlji l< K 



THE OCEAN BATTLES 

drifting wreck, answered the Glasgow's signals for an- 
other half-hour. Then no answers came: she, too, was 
gone. The good German shooting — the Gneisenau had 
several times won the Kaiser's prize for gunnery — and 
against a sharply defined target, the fact that their eight- 
inch guns threw a broadside of thirty-three hundred pounds 
to which the reply from the Good Hope's two nine-inchers 
was seven hundred and sixty pounds, and that the Brit- 
ish six-inch weapons, on their lower platforms, could do 
little in the seas that ran that day, were the decisive fac- 
tors. Indeed, the British gunners, since they could not 
"spot" the fall of their shells, fired, for want of a better 
target, at the flashes of the German guns. No attempt 
at rescue appears to have been made. The sun had al- 
ready set, and the weather, it is said, made it impossible. 
Boats could not be launched, but lines and buoys from the 
vessels themselves might have had some success. We can- 
not tell. Nothing at least was done, and not a soul of the 
sixteen hundred men aboard the two British ships sur- 
vived the battle. The unarmoured Glasgow, her sides 
rent by shells, made her best speed south to join and warn 
the Canopus. 

Von Spee's victory was complete, but Destiny had de- 
creed for him a brief career. So resounding a blow against 
the British fleet could not be suffered with impunity. It 
was soon to be countered with a still fiercer buffet. But 
he had secured for himself a name and fame in the annals 
of the sea. He had won the first, and probably the last, 
of German naval victories against the proudest of his coun- 

19 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

try's foes — Britain, not easily worsted or caught napping 
on her native element. Nor can he himself have had any 
illusions in pondering that day's work for the Fatherland, 
splendid as it was. He foresaw clearly enough destruction 
threaten him, that at no distant date he must join his gal- 
lant enemy in a sailor's grave. He made, however, the best 
use of his time, and for several weeks hovered on the trade 
routes of the south. Then difficulties of coaling, for these 
increased with every week and month, drove him to the 
Falklands, those treeless, rugged islands, where his coming 
had long been foreseen and dreaded by the little colony. 
The plan to overpower the feeble defences and to estab- 
lish there an easily defended German base had for some 
time occupied his mind. The promising move proved fa- 
tally unlucky, for he sailed straight into the lion's mouth. 
The moment the news of Craddock's defeat reached 
England, the Admiralty made an unhesitating and swift 
decision; hardly twenty-four hours elapsed before the 
avenging squadron sailed, and on December 7 Admiral 
Sturdee arrived off the Falklands with seven vessels, which 
included the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible. 
They were to coal there and thereafter make search for 
Von Spee. But he saved them the trouble, to his own 
chagrin and the amazed delight of the British sailors. The 
very morning after their arrival, punctual, as if on invita- 
tion, the German ships obligingly appeared on the horizon. 
Sturdee's squadron lay hidden behind the land and coal- 
ing quietly proceeded while the unconscious Von Spee 
drew closer. By nine o'clock the Gneisenau and the Niirn- 

20 




' A 

L^ ( M^i^is* BATTLE of the 

\ <* ;fr FALKL AND ISLES . 

^L„ \ — 



THE OCEAN BATTLES 

berg were within range and the Canopus fired a shot or 
two from the harbour over the projecting heights. The two 
cruisers sheered off and waited for their colleagues to join 
them. The British were possibly in greater strength than 
they had reckoned. Then, as they opened the harbour 
mouth, they made the fatal discovery. Not yet, however, 
did Von Spec immediately recognize the strength of the 
opposing force. It was more threatening than he had an- 
ticipated, but how threatening? He waited and watched, 
nor guessed that ere the sun had set, his fighting days 
would be done. Then the British began to emerge. First 
came the smaller ships, the Glasgow and the Kent, and 
after them the battle-cruisers but shrouded in smoke. 
When it cleared a little the German Admiral saw that only 
speed, if speed indeed availed, could help him. He turned, 
and, before that menacing array, fled under full steam to 
the east. 

The weather offered a remarkable contrast to that in 
which the battle off Coronel had been fought, for on this 
December morning sunshine flooded the calm sea and the 
breeze was light. When the chase finally settled down the 
rival fleets were within about twelve miles of each other, 
and in view of the inhabitants of Port Stanley for about 
tw r o hours. The British made no great haste, for the issues 
were not in doubt. All hands were piped to dinner as usual, 
and the time was even allowed for a smoke before Sturdee 
decided to close with the enemy. Then under the peace- 
ful heaven the sleuth hounds stretched themselves on the 
course that could only end in death. 

21 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

The prospect of imminent action hardly at all disturbs 
the routine of a British warship. She is always prepared 
and in fighting trim. Every man on board knows exactly 
what is required of him, and from the call of the bugle to 
"Action Stations," till the whole tremendous machine is 
working at its highest tension and prepared to hurl itself 
upon the enemy, hardly five minutes is required. Water- 
tight doors and portholes are closed, woodwork thrown 
overboard, inflammable gear stowed, and the men at 
quarters in a few moments. Then the ship seems deserted, 
for all the crew are behind armour. 

Strange as it may seem, hardly more than forty or fifty 
men out of seven or eight hundred on board a warship are 
actual witnesses of a modern engagement. 

In the foretop are stationed the observation officers 
who "spot" the fall of the shells and signal ranges to the 
different batteries, in the conning tower, the Captain, 
the navigator, and a few other officers and men. On the 
decks hose are laid spouting water to keep down fire; in 
the depths, to which you descend by narrow, almost per- 
pendicular, steel ladders, are the engineers, the men at 
the ammunition hoists, the telephone and telegraph men, 
and all the mighty machinery of engines, lifts, pumps, 
torpedoes, shells with which every inch of space in a war- 
ship is crowded. Man has placed there, as Ruskin long ago 
wrote, "as much of his human patience, common sense, 
forethought, experimental philosophy, self-control, habits 
of order and obedience, thorough-wrought handiwork, de- 
fiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriot- 

22 




VICE ADMIRAL SIR FREDERU K C D ST1 RDEE 



THE OCEAN BATTLES 

ism, and calm acceptance of the judgement of God as could 
well be put into a space three hundred feet long by eighty 
broad." 

As the Germans steamed away the Scharnhorst was 
leading. About one o'clock Admiral Sturdee signalled, 
"Open fire and engage enemy." Almost immediately, to 
increase their chances of escape, the three light cruisers 
left the German line and, dropping, it was thought, mines 
as they went, scattered to the south, followed at once by 
the Glasgow, the Kent, and the Cornwall. The Bristol 
had already been detached to destroy Von Spee's attend- 
ant colliers. The battle thus resolved itself into a main 
and several subsidiary actions. Firing as they ran, the 
Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst, about two o'clock, 
changed course to the southeast. By three the battle was 
at its height, the Inflexible engaging the Scharnhorst, and 
the Invincible, Sturdee's flagship, the Gneisenau, and it 
was clear that the German vessels were already receiving 
si\ are punishment. Outranged by the British their return 
tire was almost negligible. At times a shell would cause a 
large hole to appear in the Scharnhorst 's side, "through 
which could be seen a dull red glow of flame," a very 
glimpse of the pit. Soon her masts and funnels went over 
the side — by four o'clock in a great cloud of smoke and 
steam she vanished with her entire crew. The pursuit of 
the Gneisenau continued and made attempts at rescue 
impossible. Later on, about five o'clock, under the concen- 
trated fire of the British cruisers she could do no more, 
turned over at first slowly, showing the men gathering on 

23 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

her side, and then, like her unhappy consort, in a great 
burst of steam and smoke, her stern high in the air, she 
plunged to the ocean depths. 

Toward the end of the action, reports one of her surviv- 
ing officers, one could not get along the upper deck, as 
there was practically none left. "Nearly every man on 
the upper deck had been killed, all the guns were out of 
action, and one turret had been thrown bodily overboard 
by twelve-inch lyddite shell. Both their engines were 
broken up and they had a fire in the after part of the ship. 
They would probably have had many more fires, but our 
shells striking the water near the ship sent up columns of 
water which kept on putting out the fires. The spouts of 
water sent up by our shells hitting the water near them 
went up as high again as their mastheads, probably about 
three hundred feet." Half the Gneisenau's men were 
killed by shell fire before she went down. One German offi- 
cer at least has no quarrel with fortune. The turret in 
which he stood was struck and there was no other survi- 
vor. He joined the crew of another gun and the same 
thing happened. He ran to still another gun station and a 
third shell disposed of that. While he was at work with a 
fourth gun the ship sank and, after over an hour's exposure 
in the icy water, he was picked up. Some men are surely 
born under a lucky star ! The work of saving the survivors, 
floating "like a great patch of brown seaweed" on the 
surface, at once began, lines and buoys were thrown, all 
available boats swung out, and nearly two hundred men, 
including the Captain, were rescued from the icy water. 

24 



THE OCEAN BATTLES 

Incredible as it may seem, these men expected to be shot 
and exhibited astonishment and delight when kindly 
treated. How little the Germans know of England and her 
sea tradition! 

Meanwhile the Glasgow pursuing the Leipzig received 
about five o'clock a wireless message that the main battle 
was done. The German cruiser, already severely han- 
dled, fought on, however, very gallantly till nine o'clock, 
when she, too, disappeared with all hands, save five ofn- 
cera and seven men picked up by the victor. 

Another single combat, the most stirring, fiercest, and 
most equal of all in this engagement, took place between 
the Kent and the Niirnberg, which had a knot greater 
speed than the British cruiser. The story is best told in 
the words of the Kent's Captain: — 

It was a single ship action, as no other ship was in sight at the 
time. The chase commenced at noon and the action commenced 
at 5 P.M. After a sharp action, during which the Kent was struck 
by the enemy's shell no less than thirty-five times, the Niirnberg 
sank at 7.26 p.m. 

The Niirnberg is a faster ship than the Kent, but I appealed 
to the engineers and stokers to do all in their power to catch her 
and finely they responded to my appeal. The Kent went faster 
and faster until she was going twenty-five knots, more than a knot 
faster than she had ever been before. The enemy got nearer and 
Dearer until at last she got within range of our guns. Soon the 
Kent's shell began to fall thick and fast around her and she was 
struck many times till she was in flames. The enemy continued 
tiring their guns until the ship was sinking, and as she sank below 
the surface some brave men on her quarterdeck were waving the 
German ensign. No s<xmer had she sunk than the Kent's nun 
displayed the same zeal and activity in endeavouring t<> Bave life 
as they had done in fighting the ship. Boats were hastily repaired 

25 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

and lowered by men eagerly volunteering to help. Unfortunately 
the sea was rough and the water very cold, so we only succeeded 
in picking up twelve men, of whom five subsequently died. 

Thus, then, in its various episodes the battle of the Falk- 
land Isles was fought and won. A crushing and decisive 
blow had been struck, but two German ships, the Prinz 
Eitel Friederich, an armed liner, and the Dresden, a light 
cruiser, had made their escape and were still at large in 
the Pacific. They, too, had to be dealt with. For some 
months longer they contrived to elude capture and to 
harass shipping on the Chilian coast. In March, however, 
the Eitel Friederich came to the end of her resources, 
reached an American port, and decided not to leave it. 
About the same time the Dresden was rounded up by the 
Kent and the Glasgow at Juan Fernandez. She displayed 
little stomach for fighting and after a five-minutes' action 
hauled down her colours. The crew were taken on board 
the British ships. She had been badly damaged and set 
on fire. Finally the magazine exploded and she sank, the 
last of Von Spee's once able and menacing squadron. 

So terminated Germany's naval adventures in the far 
seas. They had been skilfully conducted by determined 
and resourceful men; in a fashion they proved successful; 
they may have encouraged Germany in the belief that her 
sailors were a match for Britain's, but they were, never- 
theless, hopeless from the first. And when the cost is 
counted and the final verdict is given, whether in Ger- 
many or elsewhere, who will say that the game, though 
bravely played, was worth the candle? 



CHAPTER IV 

NORTH SEA BATTLES — THE DOGGER BANK — 
JUTLAND 

The swift cruiser raids on the east coast of England 
served a double purpose. They wounded British, while 
they heartened German, homes. They had, however, a 
military as well as a political object — "to entice," said a 
German sailor who was present, "the British fleet out of 
port." "In the first place," he remarked, "our small 
cruisers, which were packed full of mines, had strewn the 
local waters with them. ... In the second place, we have 
shown the Englishman who is always boasting of his com- 
mand of the sea that he cannot protect his own coast. . . . 
In the third place, we have given the inhabitants of Eng- 
land, and especially the people of Yarmouth, a thorough 
fright." These, then, were the aims, illustrating clearly 
enough German tactics and German psychology. In the 
first raid on Yarmouth, on November 3, 1914, the attack- 
ing vessels were invisible from the shore in the autumnal 
haze and were too distant and too frightened themselves 
to do much damage; in the second, on December 16, the 
casualties were heavy in Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scar- 
borough; many women and children ware slaughtered and 
churches and houses wrecked, the firing being quite indis- 
criminate and at a venture. Once more in the mist the Ger- 

27 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

man vessels, retiring at full speed, escaped their pursuers. 
The third was planned but intercepted. 

On January 24, 1915, Admiral Beatty's patrolling squad- 
ron sighted a German fleet of four battle-cruisers, accom- 
panied by a number of light cruisers and destroyers, mak- 
ing for the English coast and distant from it about thirty 
miles. Without hesitation the Germans turned and fled 
at their best pace for home. A grim chase and a running 
fight ensued. The disposition of the German guns, for 
their vessels are more heavily armed for flight than for 
pursuit, gave them some advantage, while the British in 
the rear could bring to bear only their bow guns and not 
broadsides upon the escaping raiders. During the greater 
part of the engagement only the leading British ships, the 
Lion and the Tiger, came within reasonable range of the 
enemy. It should be borne in mind that in a general en- 
gagement, however desirable it may be for the superior 
force to close with the enemy and thus ensure his destruc- 
tion, a complete overlap must first be established by 
superior speed. Until that is obtained the enemy screen of 
destroyers thwart any such attempt by dropping mines, 
the line of which cannot safely be crossed to secure a close 
range. With the great ships racing at thirty miles an hour, 
one marvels that the range could be kept at all, yet the 
fire was deadly. The unhappy Bliicher, a great fifteen 
thousand ton ship but slower than her colleagues, fell out 
of the line shockingly mangled, and was torpedoed out of 
existence by the Arethusa. The rest fled on. Favoured 
by fortune, for a lucky shot disabled one of the Lion's feed 

28 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

tanks, they reached in melancholy straits their own mine 
fields, which forbade further pursuit, but when last seen 
the flames were mounting on the Seydlitz, the next in line, 
as high as her masthead, and the Derfflinger, ahead of her, 
was in hardly better case. Some hundreds of grateful 
survivors were picked up by the British from the Bluchcr's 
crew, one of whom is reported to have said, "On land we 
can beat you, but here, no." Despite the German tales 
not a single British vessel failed to return and the casual- 
ties were very few. 

Imagination cannot picture the condition of a vessel 
under such a sustained deluge of shells as crashed upon 
the luckless Germans. Read the account given by one of 
the Blucher's survivors: — 

Shots came slowly at first. They fell ahead and over, raising 
vast columns of water; now they fell astern and short. The British 
guns were ranging. Those deadly waterspouts crept nearer and 
nearer. The men on deck watched them with a strange fascina- 
tion. Soon one pitched close to the ship and a vast watery pillar, 
a hundred metres high one of them affirmed, fell lashing on the 
deck. The range had been found. Dann aber gings los! 

Now the shells came thick and fast with a horrible droning 
hum. At once they did terrible execution. The electric plant was 
soon destroyed, and the ship plunged in darkness that could be 
felt. "'You could not see your hand before your nose," said one. 
Down below decks there was horror and confusion, mingled with 
gasping shouts and moans as the shells plunged through the decks. 
It was only later, when the range shortened, that their trajectory 
ilattcned and they tore holes in the ship's side and raked her 
decks. At first they came dropping from the skies. They pene- 
trated the decks. They bored their way even to the stokehold. 
The coal in the bunkers was set on fire. Since the bunkers were 
half empty the fire burned merrily. In the engine-room a shell licked 

2 9 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

up the oil and sprayed it around in flames of blue and green, scar- 
ring its victims and blazing where it fell. Men huddled together 
in dark compartments, but the shells sought them out, and there 
death had a rich harvest. 

The terrific air-pressure resulting from explosion in a confined 
space, left a deep impression on the minds of the men of the 
Bliicher. The air, it would seem, roars through every opening and 
tears its way through every weak spot. All loose or insecure fittings 
are transformed into moving instruments of destruction. Open 
doors bang to, and jamb — and closed iron doors bend outward 
like tin plates, and through it all the bodies of men are whirled 
about like dead leaves in a winter blast, to be battered to death 
against the iron walls. . . . 

In one of the engine-rooms — it was the room where the high 
velocity engines for ventilation and forced draught were at work — 
men were picked up by that terrible Luftdruck, like the whirl- 
drift at a street corner, and tossed to a horrible death amidst the 
machinery. There were other horrors too fearful to recount. 

If it was appalling below deck, it was more than appalling above. 
The Bliicher was under the fire of so many ships. Even the little 
destroyers peppered her. " It was one continuous explosion," said 
a gunner. The ship heeled over as the broadsides struck her, then 
righted herself, rocking like a cradle. Gun crews were so destroyed 
that stokers had to be requisitioned to carry ammunition. Men 
lay flat for safety. The decks presented a tangled mass of scrap 
iron. . . . 

The Bliicher had run her course. She was lagging lame, and 
with the steering gear gone was beginning slowly to circle. It was 
seen that she was doomed. The bell that rang the men to church 
parade each Sunday was tolled, those who were able assembled on 
deck, helping as well as they could their wounded comrades. 
Some had to creep out through shot holes. They gathered in 
groups on deck awaiting the end. Cheers were given for the 
Bliicher, and three more for the Kaiser. "Die Wacht am Rhein" 
was sung, and permission given to leave the ship. But some of 
them had already gone. The British ships were now silent, but 
their torpedoes had done their deadly work. A cruiser and de- 
stroyers were at hand to rescue the survivors. The wounded 

30 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

BlQcher Bettled down, turned wearily over, and disappeared in a 
swirl of water. 

This action' gave pause to Germany. Licking her wounds 
and nursing unhappy memories she decided to forego for a 
time the pleasures and political advantages of raiding and 
to spread for Britain less costly lures. A half-hearted at- 
tempt on Lowestoft, which had little serious result, was, 
indeed, made in April, 1916, — a half-hour's friendly call: 
Sir John Jcllicoe would have preferred a longer visit, but 
in these matters Germany preserves a rigid etiquette. 

Of raids great and small it may be observed that they 
are the only activities, no great things, left to the German 
Navy, powerful as it is. Other and better occupations, 
indeed, it has none, no mercantile marine to protect, no 
mines to sweep, no transports or wide extent of coast to 
guard. A raiding squadron can choose its own hour, dash 
out at night or in fog, fire at anything it may chance to see, 
trawler or trader, fisher or warship, enemy or neutral, and 
return at express speed. Of these trivial achievements is 
it possible that so great a fleet, debarred from all other 
undertakings, can really be proud? 

Come now to that stern and decisive conflict, which 
clinched, as it were, the naval situation, the battle of Jut- 
land, in respect of all particulars that make a battle great, 
the magnitude of the forces engaged, the scale of the opera- 
tions, and the significance of the results, the fiercest clash 
of fleets since Trafalgar. Fought on a summer's day, the 
eve of the glorious "first of June," so famous in the annals 
of the British Navy, it compares in hardly a single feature 

31 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

with any naval conflict in history, except perhaps with 
that minor action in the Bight of Heligoland, which in 
some fashion it resembles. For like that it was a far-flung 
and dispersed series of conflicts, a clashing of ships in mist 
and darkness or in patches of short-lived light. At ex- 
treme range, to avoid the deadly torpedo attacks, the 
great war-vessels pounded each other amid haze and 
smoke screens, behind which the Germans when pressed 
withdrew from sight. Wounded vessels drifted out of the 
scene and left their fate in doubt; destroyers dashed to 
and fro attacking and retreating; ships, the flames licking 
their iron masts a hundred feet aloft, loomed up for a few 
moments only to vanish in the mist. As "was anticipated" 
the Germans put their trust chiefly in torpedo attacks, 
easily made against approaching, difficult to direct against 
retiring, vessels. Throughout destroyers on both sides 
played a magnificent and conspicuous part, the "hussar" 
tactics of a naval action. But so numerous were the vessels 
engaged and so dim the weather that a certain confusion 
inseparable from the conditions reigned the entire day. 
Indubitably a long-hoped-for opportunity had come to 
the British; the German fleet had actually emerged in 
strength and "upon an enterprise." Yet emerged only to 
withdraw, to tantalize, and, if possible, to lure into fatal 
areas the pursuing foe. 

The annoyance which Nelson suffered from the French 
Admiral Latouche Treville, who used "to play bo-peep in 
and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of her hole, 1 ' as 
the British Admiral expressed it, was the lot also of Sir 

32 




2NC 



GERNAI* JUTLAND 
FLEET \ 8ANK 



\ 



VON SCHEERS 
HIGH SEA FLEET 




APPROXIMATE C 



JELLICOES 
GRANO FLEET 
6 O 



6 20 

HOOD'S 

BATTLE 

J CRUISERS 

n3SQOAOR0N) 



JUTLAND 
BANK 



3 rd STAGE 
N 



TlAND 
BANK 




BRITISH 
DESTROYER 

ATTACKS 



BEATTY 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

John Jcllicoc. Von Schccr repeated the tactics of La- 
touche. His orders were, no doubt, the same, to show the 
"greatest circumspection," to risk nothing. But this "fet- 
tered and timid" warfare, as a French writer once com- 
plained, must always fail. The chief hope and aim of the 
British fleet in the present war has been the same as Nel- 
son's, to compel a decisive engagement; the aim of the 
enemy's fleet to avoid one, a perfectly legitimate and per- 
fectly intelligible policy, with which no one can quarrel. 

Germany consistently refuses all actions except on 
chosen ground at her own front door, where she can, when 
the odds are against her, withdraw her ships immediately 
within her protected ports and slam the door in the face 
of her antagonist. There only will she fight, within a few 
miles of her own coast, in shallow waters suitable for the 
operation of underwater craft, and in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of her own mine fields. Had Nelson been alive 
to-day he could have done no more than the British Ad- 
mirals have done — offer battle to the unwilling enemy on 
his own terms. Germany takes only as much of the war as 
she wishes, Britain takes the whole, everywhere and all 
the time. Repeatedly Sir David Beatty has faced this sit- 
uation with its attendant risks. Repeatedly with his cruis- 
ing squadron he appeared within sight of the German de- 
fences, four hundred miles from his own base. If he could 
engage the Germans even at heavy cost to himself, "cling 
to them as long as his teeth would hold," in an entangling 
and detaining action the Grand Fleet might reach him in 
time to secure an overwhelming victory. That was his 

33 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

hope. And let it be frankly admitted the hope was not 
fulfilled. At Jutland once more he took the risks — some 
say unwisely, for why do more than contain the German 
Navy useless in its ports? — he incurred the inevitable 
losses, the main British fleet arrived in time to strike a 
shattering blow, but failed to administer the coup de grace. 
"I can fully sympathize with his feelings," wrote Sir John 
Jellicoe, "when the evening mist and fading light robbed 
the fleet of that complete victory for which he had man- 
oeuvred, and for which the vessels in company with him 
had striven so hard." 

To understand, even in a measure, this immense con- 
flict, one must bear in mind that the British Grand Fleet 
under Sir John Jellicoe was on May 30 actually at sea, 
to the north of Sir David Beatty's battle-cruisers, who 
on the 31st, having completed his sweep, turned away 
from the south to rejoin the Commander-in-Chief. Since 
the tactics which led to it cannot be here disclosed, let us 
pass at once to the encounter itself. About half-past two 
Beatty received signals from his light cruiser squadron 
that the enemy was out and in force. A seaplane scout 
went aloft and confirmed the signals. German battle- 
cruisers were in sight, but falling back upon probably still 
stronger forces. To engage or not to engage was hardly 
Beatty's problem. Should he at all cost pursue, encounter, 
and detain the foe, or, avoiding more than a mere ex- 
change of shots, continue on his course to join Admiral 
Jellicoe? Faint heart never won a great decision. He chose 
the heroic, the British, way, and determined to force the 

34 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

battle, "to engage the enemy in sight." We may, per- 
haps, best understand the action if we divide it into three 
stages, (a) pursuit, (b) retreat, (c) again pursuit; the first, 
that in which Beatty was engaged with the enemy's battle- 
cruisers falling back upon (heir main fleet, which lasted 
about an hour, from 3.48 when the opening shots were 
fired till the German High Seas Fleet showed itself at 4.38. 
At this point Beatty swung round to draw the enemy to- 
ward Jellicoe approaching from the north, and the second 
stage of the battle began in which the British were heavily 
engaged with a greatly superior force, in fact, the whole 
German Navy. They had, however, the assistance of the 
Fifth Battle Squadron under Evan Thomas, four power- 
ful battleships which had come up during the first phase, 
fired a few shots at the extreme range of about twelve 
miles and took the first fire of Von Scheer's battleships. 
Steaming north now instead of south, Beatty slackened 
speed to keep in touch with the heavy ships. This stage 
of the action also lasted about an hour or more, when 
about six o'clock Jellicoe came in sight five miles to the 
north, and the third phase began. Beatty toward the end 
of the second stage had drawn ahead of the enemy, press- 
ing in upon and curving round his line, and now drove 
straight across it to the east, closing the range to twelve 
thousand yards, with two objects — first, to bring the 
leading German ships under concentrated fire, and second, 
to allow a clear space for Jellicoe to come down and com- 
plete their destruction. It was a masterly manoeuvre 
which enabled the Third Battle-Cruiser Squadron, in ad- 

35 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

vance of Jellicoe, under Admiral Hood, to join at once in 
the battle, and assist in "crumpling up" the head of the 
German line. 

The supreme moment had come. Jellicoe's great fleet 
was in line behind Hood, bearing down on Von Scheer in 
overwhelming force. By beautiful handling the British 
Admiral effected the junction of his fleets in very difficult 
conditions. There still remains in naval warfare much of 
the splendid pageantry of old, which in land operations is 
gone beyond recall. "The grandest sight I have ever seen," 
wrote an officer in the fleet, "was the sight of our battle 
line — miles of it fading into mist — taking up their posi- 
tions like clock-work and then belching forth great sheets 
of fire and clouds of smoke." But the prize was snatched 
from the British grasp. It was already seven o'clock and 
the evening brought with it the thick North Sea haze be- 
hind which and his own smoke screens Von Scheer turned 
and fled for his ports. "Great care was necessary," wrote 
Sir John Jellicoe, "to ensure that our own ships were not 
mistaken for enemy vessels." By half-past eight or nine 
practically all was over, save for the British destroyer at- 
tacks, which lasted far into the darkness, on the scattered 
and fleeing enemy. Only two hours of a misty daylight 
had been left to Sir John Jellicoe to accomplish his task. 
Then came night, and in the night the shattered and shaken 
Germans crept — one is not quite clear by what route — 
through their mine fields to the blessed security of pro- 
tected harbours. Had the weather been different — well, 
who knows whether in that case the German fleet would 

36 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

have put to sea? Now as ever in naval warfare command- 
ers must choose conditions the most favourable to their 
designs. The British Admiral remained on the scene of the 
battle, picking up survivors from some of the smaller craft 
till after midday (1.15 p.m.) on June 1. On that day not 
one German ship was in sight on a sea strewn with the tan- 
gled and shapeless wreckage of proud vessels, the melan- 
choly litter of war. 

Perhaps Jutland, inconclusive as it seemed, may be 
judged by the world the true crisis of the struggle. While 
Germany, after her manner, poured forth to the sceptical 
world tidings of amazing victory, Britain, too, after her 
manner, said little save bluntly to record her losses, and 
later published merely the reports of the admirals engaged. 
They are very plain and matter-of-fact, these documents 
without brag. So they can be recommended to the atten- 
tion of seekers after truth. For lovers of romance, of 
course, the German versions will afford brighter reading. 

Here, however, is the unofficial account of a midship- 
man on board one of the battleships: — 

We were all as cheery as Punch when action was sounded off. 
The battle-cruisers, which, by the way, were first sighted by your 
eldest son, who went without his tea to look out in the foretop, 
were away op the bow, firing like blazes, and doing a colossal turn 
of speed. I expect they were very pleased to see us. The battle 
fleet put it across them properly. We personally "strated" a 
large battleship, which we left badly bent, and very much on fire. 
They fired stink shells at us, which fortunately bursl some dis- 
tance away. They looked as if they smelt horrible. We engaged a 
Zepp which Bhowed an inclination to become pally. I think it 
thought we were Germans. Altogether it was some stunt. 

37 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

Yes, you were right, I was up in the foretop and saw the whole 
show. I told you I was seventeen hours up there, did n't I? Simply 
bristling with glasses, revolvers, respirators, ear-protectors, and 
what-nots. I cannot imagine anything more intensely dramatic 
than our final junction with the battle-cruisers. They appeared 
on the starboard bow going a tremendous speed and firing like 
blazes at an enemy we could not see. Even before we opened first 
the colossal noise was nearly deafening. The Grand Fleet opened 
fire. We commenced by "strafing" one of the "Kaisers" that was 
only just visible on the horizon, going hell for leather. The whole 
High Sea Fleet were firing like blazes. 

It is the most extraordinary sensation I know to be sitting up 
there in the foretop gazing at a comparatively unruffled bit of sea, 
when suddenly about five immense columns of water about a 
hundred feet high shoot up as if from nowhere, and bits of shell 
go rattling down into the water, or else, with a noise like an 
express train, the projectiles go screeching overhead and fall 
about a mile the other side of you. You watch the enemy firing 
six great flashes about as many miles away, and then for fifteen 
seconds or so you reflect that there is about two tons of sudden 
death hurtling toward you. Then with a sigh of relief the splashes 
rise up, all six of them, away on the starboard bow. On the other 
hand, there is a most savage exultation in firing at another ship. 

You hear the order "Fire!" the foretop gets up and hits you in 
the face, an enormous yellow cloud of cordite smoke — the charge 
weighs two thousand pounds — rises up and blows away just as 
the gentleman with the stop-watch says, "Time ! " and then you see 
the splashes go up, perhaps between you and the enemy, behind 
the enemy, perhaps, or, if you are lucky, a great flash breaks out 
on the enemy, and when the smoke has rolled away you just have 
time to see that she is well and truly blazing before the next salvo 
goes off. I had the extreme satisfaction of seeing the Liitzow get 
a salvo which must have caused her furiously to sink. There are 
minor side-shows, too, which contribute greatly to the excitement. 

We also discharged our large pieces at the Rostock, but she 
was getting such a thin time from somebody else that we refrained 
from pressing the question. Her mainmast and after-funnel had 
gone. She was quite stationary, and badly on fire. We sighted 

38 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

submarines, two in number, and also large numbers of enemy 
destroyers, one of which we soundly "strafed." So soundly, in 
fact, that it gave up the ghost . • . 

Well, when I climbed down from the forctop late that ni^ht I 
was as black as a nigger, very tired, and as hungry as a hunter, 
I having missed my tea. I wish you could have seen the state we 
were in between the decks. Water everywhere, chairs, stools, 
radiators, tin baths, boots, shoes, clothes, books, and every con- 
ceivable article, clunked all over the place. We did n't care a h^, 
because we all thought of "Der Tag" on the morrow which we all 
expected. Destroyers and light cruisers were attacking like fury 
all night, and when I got up at the bugle "Action!" at 2 A.M. I 
felt as if I had slept about three and a half minutes. At about 3 a.m. 
we sighted a Zepp, which was vigorously fired at. It made off 
"quam celerrime," which means quick with a capital Q. 

Look now a little more closely at the details and epi- 
sodes of this engagement. Picture a calm and hazy sea 
and spread over an immense area the fleets of larger ships 
surrounded by screens of light cruisers and destroyers 
furiously engaged in encounters of their own, battles with- 
in the greater battle, and one sees how entirely this action 
lacks the classic simplicity of such engagements as the 
battle of the Nile or Trafalgar. But the main movements 
are clear enough. The heaviest losses of the British were 
sustained in the earlier, of the Germans in the later, stages, 
when the efficiency of their gunnery "became rapidly 
reduced under punishment, while ours was maintained 
throughout." Hardly was Beatty in action before he lost 
two battle cruisers, the Indefatigable and the Queen Mary. 
Later, the Invincible, the flagship of the Third Cruiser 
Squadron, went down with Admiral Hood, who had 
brought bis ships into "action ahead in a most inspiring 

39 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

manner worthy of his great naval ancestors." One may 
note here two difficulties of pursuit in a modern action: 
first, that the enemy fire is concentrated on the leading 
ship, which can hardly escape punishment, and second, 
that his fast smaller craft, continually present on your 
engaged bow, discharge torpedoes and drop mines if you 
attempt to close him. Three armoured cruisers and eight 
destroyers shared the fate of the larger vessels. The Ger- 
man losses, on a conservative estimate, were still more 
severe, especially when "the head of their line was crum- 
pled up, leaving battleships as targets for the majority 
of our battle-cruisers." The enemy constantly "turned 
away" in the last stage and under cover of smoke screens 
endeavoured to avoid the withering fifteen-inch gun fire, 
but at least four or five battleships and battle-cruisers, 
as many light cruisers, and six or eight destroyers were 
finally lost, probably twenty vessels in all and ten thousand 
men. 

Throughout the day of thunderous war the destroyers 
dashed to the torpedo attacks on the great ships, careless 
of the heart-shaking deluge of shells, utterly careless of life 
and youth, and all else save the mighty business in hand, 
and when night put an end to the main action, continued 
their work in the uncanny darkness, under the momen- 
tary glare of searchlights or the spouting flames from 
some wounded vessel. And all the while the unruffled sea 
appeared, we are told, like a marble surface when the 
searchlights swept it, and moving there the destroyers 
looked like venomous insects — "black as cockroaches 

40 




REAR IDMIRALTHEHON. HOK.M-K I. \ . II'X'D. i ' U MAo.D.SO 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

on a floor." Never in the proud history of her navy have 
English sailors fought with more inspiring dash, more 
superb intrepidity. "The Skipper was perfectly wonder- 
ful," wrote one young officer to his home. "He never left 
the bridge for a minute for twenty-four hours, and was 
either on the bridge or in the chart-house the whole time 
we were out, and I 've never seen anybody so cool and un- 
ruffled. He stood there sucking his pipe as if nothing out 
of the ordinary were happening." Or, again, "A little Brit- 
ish destroyer, her midships rent by a great shell meant 
for a battle-cruiser, exuding steam from every pore, able 
to go ahead but not to steer, coming down diagonally 
across our line, unable to get out of anybody's way; like 
to be rammed by any one of a dozen ships; her siren whim- 
pering, 'Let me through, make way!'; her crew fallen in 
aft, dressed in life belts, ready for her final plunge — and 
cheering wildly as it might have been an enthusiastic 
crowd when the King passes. Perfectly magnificent!" 
"Sir David Beatty," said the Commander-in-Chief, 
"showed all his fine qualities of gallant leadership, firm 
determination and correct strategical insight." "The con- 
duct of officers and men throughout the day and night was 
entirely beyond praise. No word of mine can do them 
justice. On all sides it is reported to me that the glorious 
traditions of the past were most worthily upheld. I cannot 
adequately express the pride with which the spirit of the 
fleet filled me." Who will venture to add to that testi- 
mony! Let us say only that Nelson would have been 
proud to command such men. Nor did the British refuse 

4i 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

their tribute to a courageous foe. They "fought," said Sir 
John Jellicoe, "with the gallantry that was expected of 
them. We particularly admired the conduct of those on 
board a disabled German light cruiser, which passed down 
the British line shortly after deployment, under a heavy 
fire, which was returned by the only gun left in action." 

So ended the battle of Jutland. But this, you may nat- 
urally say, is very different from the German story. There 
is no denying it, the discrepancy exists. Make the most 
liberal allowance for national prejudices and you cannot 
harmonize the versions. Which, then, are we to believe? 
There are no independent witnesses that can be summoned 
into court. How can one decide between statements so 
conflicting? There is one way and one way only. Victor- 
ies, like everything else in the world, have results; a tree 
is known by its fruits. If, indeed, therefore, the Germans 
won, as they claim, a great victory, — they were certainly 
first in the field with the news, and, lest there should be 
any mistake in the matter, made the announcement at 
express speed, — how, the announcement apart, do we 
know of it? We have, of course, the Kaiser's assurances 
to his people, and that is of great importance. But did he 
also announce that the British blockade would no longer 
harass Germany? Oddly enough it was not mentioned and 
since the battle has become much more stringent. Do 
German merchantmen now go to sea? None are to be 
found on any waterway except as before in the Baltic. On 
the other hand, let us ponder these facts: Immediately 
after the engagement the great naval port, Wilhelmshaven, 

42 



NORTH SEA BATTLES 

was sealed with seven seals, so that no patriotic German 
could look upon his victorious ships. Britain proclaimed 
her losses, Germany concealed her wounds. Later she dis- 
covered that she had accidentally in her haste overlooked 
the loss of a few trifling vessels. And meanwhile, steadily 
and without even momentary interruption, British mer- 
chantmen and liners pursued, as they had hitherto pur- 
sued, their accustomed journeys; the transport of soldiers 
by the hundred thousand, of supplies by the million ton, 
of artillery, heavy artillery, by the shipload proceeded in 
the Channel, the Mediterranean, the Indian and Atlantic 
Oceans. If these results are possible after "defeat," how 
magnificent must be the fruits of "victory." One enquires 
for them without much success. They are very disappoint- 
ing in fruit, these paper trees. 



CHAPTER V 

THE SUBMARINE MENACE — THE WORK OF 
BRITISH SUBMARINES 

The submarine is not a German invention. Nearly a 
hundred and fifty years ago, in 1774, an Englishman 
named Day was drowned at Plymouth while experiment- 
ing with an underwater boat of his own invention. Ameri- 
can engineers, like Bushnell and Fulton, did more than 
any others to perfect the type, and an American, Holland, 
first solved in a practical fashion the problem of submarine 
navigation. His vessel was so highly thought of in England 
that the construction of others was at once begun, and 
since 1901 submarines have formed part of the British 
Navy. Exactly as with the problem of flight in the air 
Germany did not originate, she followed the ideas of 
brighter and quicker minds. Her experts laughed when 
Britain first added these boats to her fleet, but anxiety 
followed premature laughter, and by 1906 she awoke to 
the obvious fact that they had a future, especially as the 
weapon of the weaker naval power. At the beginning of 
hostilities Germany had probably in commission forty 
such vessels as against Britain's sixty or seventy. Even 
in this region of naval strength on which she prides herself 
she was inferior. Yet no one will deny that the deeds of 
German submarines have filled our ears, while little has 
been heard of Britain's doings beneath the sea. The rea- 

44 




V ' 



SUBMARINES 

son is not far to sock. The sportsman's bag will be large if 
game be plenty, and if he fire at every living thing he may 
chance to sec. It will be correspondingly small if his aim 
be to bring down only the rarely met and dangerous ani- 
mals and permit the rest to pass unharmed. On all the 
seas of all the world passenger, trading, and fishing ves- 
sels, line after line, pursue their lawful enterprises under 
the British flag. There is no scarcity of game for the 
hunter and no great glory in the sport, for, add neutral 
ships and on the busy streets of the sea, one could hardly 
discharge a torpedo in any direction without striking some- 
thing that floats. "A week or two ago," wrote a voyager 
in the North Sea in October, 1914, "I counted at one time 
from one point forty-seven vessels, tramps, trawlers, 
drifters, all in full view, and I took no count of sailing craft 
or of vessels hull down in the offing." Not one of these was 
a German ship. All were open to the attack of German 
raiders, while for the British submarine commander not a 
single target was in view. Who, then, need feel surprise 
that vastly more has been heard of Germany than Britain 
in this form of war? But something has still to be added. 
Preserving as she must the grand traditions and noble 
chivalry of the sea, which are, indeed, in so large a measure, 
her creation, Britain takes anxious care for the lives of 
voyagers and the shedding of innocent blood has never 
been her foible. For Germany no meaning attaches to the 
splendid and moving history of ships and sea-going, of the 
fellowship among mariners of all nations, of the humanity 
that distinguishes the true sailor, of the honourable code 

45 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

of chivalry to which his allegiance is due and by which he 
is proudly bound. Ships are for her but trading or mili- 
tary machines. Germany, having freed herself from the 
noble restraint that distinguishes the seafaring nations, 
profits by her "freedom." Of this "liberty" the world 
must judge. "Things are what they are and the conse- 
quences of them will be what they will be." Meanwhile the 
spectacular glory is all her own and no Briton desires to 
contest her claim to it. 

One must allow that Germany's submarines achieved cer- 
tain legitimate successes against warships, more especially 
in the early days, but these did nothing to alter the balance 
of naval power, and her great and less glorious campaign 
has been against defenceless vessels. Why has she devoted 
such energy and attention to submarine warfare? For no 
other reason than despair of doing anything else upon the 
seas. "On and after February 18 [191 5] every enemy ship 
found in the war region will be destroyed," she announced, 
"without its being always possible to warn the crew or 
passengers of the dangers threatening." Before that date, 
indeed, vessels like the Ben Cruachan had been sunk, for 
the sake, one supposes, of a little preliminary practice. 
But the world refused to believe that men had really come 
to this, that a great nation was prepared in pursuit of her 
purpose to slay both friends and enemies, to outrage and 
so cultivate the respect and admiration of humanity. They 
were driven to revise their estimate of what, indeed, was 
possible among Christians. On May 7 came the greatest 
moral shock civilization had ever received, and the black 

46 




LOOKIM". riiKniuii III I- PERISCOP1 OF A SUBMARINE 



SUBMARINES 

horror of it seemed to eclipse the last hopes of human kind. 
A great passenger liner, unarmed, a mere floating hotel 
crowded with innocent passengers, many of them Ameri- 
cans, deliberately mangled by a German torpedo, sank in 
.1 few minutes with twelve hundred victims of the felon 
Mow. Germany received the news with joyful applause, 
with thanksgiving to the German God, for was not this a 
signal proof of divine assistance? 

"The officers of the German Navy," said Baron Mar- 
shall von Bicberstein, at The Hague in 1907 — "I say it 
with a high voice — will always fulfil in the strictest man- 
ner the duties which flow from the unwritten law of hu- 
manity and civilization." So the Herr Baron Marshall von 
Bicberstein! A high voice, a high tone, a high personage! 
A single word remains to be added to this lofty and agree- 
able announcement — "Lusitania!" 

One point of extreme importance must here be empha- 
sized. The British declaration of foodstuffs as absolute 
contraband followed the German attempt to staroe her rival 
by the submarine attack on traders; Germany, though she 
represents Britain as the aggressor, herself initiated the 
starvation campaign. She saw and struck at Britain's vul- 
nerable spot, the supply of food to her people. Von Tir- 
pitz declared that he could "starve England" and the 
German announcement bears the date February, 1915J 
the British answer to it came in March of the same year. 
For the facts, if facts have any meaning in these days, con- 
sult the documents. 

Possibly no single accomplishment of the British Navy 

47 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

will in the end rank higher than the incomparable resource 
and incomprehensible skill with which it met the new, un- 
expected, and fiercely driven attack. Figure to yourself the 
task. Remember the number of possible victims on the 
crowded waters, the extent of the seas themselves, with 
their innumerable and hidden avenues of approach, the 
invisibility of the shark-like foe, the swift and stealthy 
advance from any quarter, the destructive character of 
his weapon. Imagine defending yourself in the dark from 
a blow which may be struck at any moment and from any 
direction. Well may Von Tirpitz and his followers have 
believed that all precautions would be vain, and that the 
submarine ruthlessly employed must bring the hated foe 
to her knees. Resolutely wielded it seemed impossible 
that it should fail. Yet fail it did, and failed because, with 
that deep instinct for the sea and all that pertains to it, 
British sailors devised a hundred measures, so ingenious, 
so resourceful, so unforeseen, that numbers of the merci- 
less raiders vanished with their crews. Doubtless with 
fierce energy Germany continues to build and despatch 
others, doubtless her victims have been numerous and will 
be more numerous still. Yet fierce and fast though she 
send them one hardly thinks that the British Empire will 
be sunk by torpedoes. Foiled in the narrow seas, foiled in 
the wider waters of the Mediterranean, Germany has now 
extended her operations to the still wider Atlantic. She 
will take her toll of shipping, hundreds more will be done 
to death, but it will all prove a delusion and then will come 
the reckoning. "The gods," said a Roman, "never con- 

48 



SUBMARINES 

cern themselves with the protection of the innocent, but 
only with the punishment of the guilty." For the sake of 
victory Germany bade farewell to honour and nobility and 
generosity, and like the great Apostate Angel declared, 
"Evil, be thou my Good!" And in the end what will be 
left to her? The terrible accusing finger of humanity ever 
pointing to the hideous record — innocent freights of 
women and children, unoffending and defenceless fisher- 
men and holiday-makers, non-combatants, citizens of 
friendly states, of neutral countries — all murdered. Ger- 
many will yet, I fancy, desire with a great longing to blot 
this and some other chapters she has written out of the 
world's book of remembrance and she will not be able. 
What a burden for a people to bear till the end of time ! 

"The moving finger writes, and having writ 
Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit 
Can lure it back to cancel half a line, 
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it." 

The Lusitania, one thinks, will avenge itself. 

Despite its widely advertised activities and ravages 
among defenceless ships, against which, of course, any 
old blunderbuss of a weapon, if supported by speed, will 
serve, as a fighting vessel the submarine has proved dis- 
tinctly disappointing. So slow a craft — no submersible 
can equal the speed of a surface ship — becomes the easy 
prey of a destroyer which, travelling almost twice as fast, 
can cover considerably over a mile in the time a sub- 
marine takes to dive and ram it even when some feet 
below the surface. Blind always by night, blind by day 

49 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

when the periscope is submerged, the submarine betrays 
itself in smooth water by a following wave and attracts 
the unwelcome attention of excited sea-birds to whom the 
strange monster is clearly visible far below the surface. 
Probably in the future its greatest enemy will be the air- 
ship, which discerns the unconscious enemy at a great 
depth, remains poised above it, waits for the rise, and then 
in perfect security drops a bomb which shatters and sinks 
it. This feat has already been performed by a British air- 
man off Middelkerke on November 28, 1915. The effec- 
tive handling, too, of this weapon, especially against swift 
armed vessels, is not easily learned. "If any one wishes 
to appreciate some of the difficulties of submarine work," 
says Admiral Bacon, "let him sit down under a chart of 
the Channel suspended from the ceiling, let him punch a 
hole through it, and above the hole place a piece of look- 
ing glass inclined at forty-five degrees. Let him further 
imagine his chair and glass moving sideways as the effect 
of tide. Let him occasionally fill the room with steam to 
represent mist. Let him finally crumple his chart in ridges 
to represent waves, and then try to carry out some of the 
manoeuvres which look so simple when the chart is spread 
out on a table and looked down upon in the quiet solitude 
of a well-lit study." 

We know what German submarines have, or have not, 
achieved since August, 1914. Turn now to the other side 
of the account and contrast the work of British officers and 
men in these vessels which have given so strange and un- 
exampled a character to the naval war of to-day. Neces- 

50 



SUBMARINES 

sarily it was very different work, directed exclusively 

against the military strength of the Central Powers. "The 
Trade," as it is called in the British Navy, offers a field 
to adventurous spirits, and its doings have been many and 
astounding, but unadvertiscd. Long before Germany's, 
British submarines crossed the Atlantic; but their chief 
centres of operations — the war zones of the North Sea 
and the Dardanelles — gave to their commanders more 
varied and exciting problems than ocean cruising. Take 
a few remarks from the log books. "Spray froze as it 
struck and bridge became a mass of ice. Experienced con- 
siderable difficulty in keeping the conning tower hatch 
free from ice. Found it necessary to keep a man continu- 
ously employed on this work. Bridge screen immovable, 
ice screen six inches thick on it. Telegraphs frozen." 
"Heard a noise similar to grounding. Knowing this to be 
impossible in the water in which the boat then was, I came 
up to twenty feet to investigate, and observed a large mine 
preceding the periscope at a distance of about twenty feet, 
which was apparently hung up by its moorings to the port 
hydroplane." That particular trouble was got rid of after 
a series of complicated manoeuvres. 

A somewhat trying life, one judges, and, indeed, what 
between keeping a weather eye open for destroyers, scrap- 
ing along the bottom to avoid mines, blindly groping for 
the only channel, diving for your life with no certainty that 
the depth is sufficient to enable you to escape the bow of 
a ramming enemy, twisting into position for a shot at hos- 
tile' craft, waiting for "tin- correct moment after tiring" 

51 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

till the torpedo detonates, cautiously rising again to as- 
certain results, diving at once and with extreme haste to 
avoid a destroyer lying in wait for you — you are amply 
provided with the type of romance in which are concen- 
trated the joys of hunting and being hunted at the selfsame 
time. For sorrows you have the stoppage of engines when 
most desperately required, hitches in your electric appara- 
tus, defects in machinery, leaks in the tanks, entangle- 
ment in nets and wires, exasperation when your well- 
directed torpedo fails to explode, and all the minor ills of 
life in a "box full of tricks," where the air as well as the 
food is always "tinned," and oil exudes from every corner 
and joint and fitting. 

The Sea of Marmora provided even more varied fare, 
hourly thrills of the finest quality. For here the game was 
complicated by a system of nets and wires of fabulous and 
fascinating intricacy, cunning beyond computation, while 
shore batteries and even "horsemen on the cliffs," not to 
speak of patrolling tugs and dhows, let loose their artillery. 
Torpedo boats shepherded you, sweeping trawlers geni- 
ally attempted to encircle you with nets, even at one 
time "the men in a small steamboat leaning over tried to 
catch hold of the top of the periscope." A crowded scene 
and a busy life in the neighbourhood of Constantinople! 
And when at the end of three weeks or so of this gentle 
art of sinking enemies, after losing possibly one of your 
periscopes by a well-aimed shot from a big gun, or bumping 
along the bottom in a fierce tide, watching the compass 
while the current swirls your vessel — or your coffin — to 

52 



SUBMARINES 

and fro, you crave a little respite and repose — you find 
it "in the centre of the Sea of Marmora," that shady un- 
tillcd garden of the East. 

So runs the tale as told by these young Britons, not, 
indeed, to the curious public, but in their log books for the 
better information of "My lords" at the Admiralty. Their 
"business" was, of course, that of grievous war, the harry- 
ing of transports and munition ships, the destruction of 
battleships like the Barbarossa, or the ubiquitous gunboats. 
Passenger steamers they always spared, hospital ships 
went unmolested, and, even when dhows laden with mili- 
tary stores had to be disposed of, the crews were "towed 
in shore and given biscuits, beef and rum and water, as 
they were rather wet." The Turk has proved a more hon- 
ourable foe than his master the German, he both offers 
and receives courtesies. One is not surprised to hear that 
in these cases they parted from our humane commanders 
"with many expressions of good-will." 



CHAPTER VI 
BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT 

What are Germany's views on blockade? "Whoever 
is engaged in war," said Caprivi, the German Chancellor, 
in the Reichstag, "wishes to obtain his object; and if 
he be vigorous he will employ every means to obtain it. 
In a naval war the cutting off of an enemy's supplies is 
one of those means. No one can forego it. And, really, is 
it anything more than is done on land? If during the siege 
of Paris some one had equipped a train with foodstuffs for 
the Parisians the train would simply have been stopped. 
Exactly the same thing happens at sea. If some one equipped 
a ship to supply the wants of the enemy, then the other 
side would try to capture those supplies, even if they con- 
sisted only of foodstuffs and raw material indispensable 
for the enemy's industries. . . . In such conduct I should see 
absolutely no barbarity, or any difference from the measures 
taken in a war on land." 

Before the war these were Germany's principles, quite 
simply and unequivocably enunciated, nor is there any 
need to expand them. If she no longer approves of these 
principles one understands it. Things may be much less 
pleasant to suffer than to inflict. But there stands her 
declaration, make of it what you will. 

With the principles of blockade, however, the British 
Navy is not concerned. It fulfils the duties prescribed to 

54 



BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT 

it, stretching a great net from north to south, from Ireland 
to the Mediterranean, a net with meshes so close that the 
fish, however dexterous and elusive, comes to rest there 
at last. In the early months a cruiser squadron did the 
netting, but by degrees old warships were exchanged for 
swifter steamers and lighter craft mounting guns, com- 
manded by a naval officer, but retaining for the most part 
their old crews, men who had learned their seamanship in 
widely varying schools, steamer and 'fore-and-after, trad- 
ing or fishing fleets. Only a great maritime nation breeds 
this hardy race or builds the ships they manned — a 
great company, hundreds of them of every shape and rig, 
trawlers rubbing shoulders with yachts, drifters with 
tramps, tugs with motor-boats, the true democracy of the 
sea. The aristocracy all this while on its "shrouded throne 
among the northern storms " had its own affairs in hand, 
more dignified occupations no less efficiently performed. 

The blockading ships have their rules and regulations 
apart and hold lonelier vigil. For thirty or forty days 
each vessel keeps the seas, through all the hazards of fog 
and storm as in times of peace with the added uncer- 
tainties and dangers of a bitter war. Day and night, 
whatever the skies, they toss on their weary beats, weav- 
ing the inner or the outer meshes — for you are not yet 
Bafe when you pass one line of ships — of the barrier 
patrol. From the 1st to the 21st of September, 1916, 
four hundred and thirty-five vessels were intercepted by 
the Northern Patrol. "Out at sea and working on deck 
for at least twenty hours," said a fisherman, "wet through 

55 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

to the skin, then below for two hours' sleep. Then come 
on deck for another twenty hours, and keep on doing that 
for a month, Blow high, blow low, rain, hail or snow, mines 
or submarines, we have to go through it." Boarding sus- 
picious vessels, too, in heavy weather, when boats can 
hardly be launched and the spray freezes on the deck, 
through the long winter nights of northern latitudes in 
blinding sleet and rain. "We have just crawled into port 
again," wrote an officer; "what fearful weather it has 
been, nothing but gales, rain and snow, with rough seas. 
Two nights out of the last four were terrible. . . . Here 
for the last fortnight it seems to have been one incessant 
gale, sometimes from the East and then, for a change, 
from the West, with rain all the time. This morning it did 
turn out fine, but it has now set in a howling easterly gale 
with snow. . . . The strictest look-out must be kept at all 
times, as, with the rough seas that are going now, a sub- 
marine's periscope takes a bit of spotting, likewise a float- 
ing mine," the watchers "hanging on to the rigging in 
blinding rain with seas drenching over them for four hours 
at a time, peering into the darkness." And this only the 
"watch and ward," for when the suspected ship is stopped 
— and one out of every eight of them was attempting 
to run the blockade — there remained the multitudinous 
tricks to be detected, the false manifests, the hollow spars 
and hollow bottoms, stuffed with contraband, the copper 
keels, the cotton in flour barrels and the rubber in coffee 
bags, so that only a kind of second-sight could divine the 
endless and unheard-of expedients. 

56 




Phi! 

LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER MAX K HI 



BLOCKADE AND BOiMBARDMENT 

So it went and still goes, and none save those who know 
the sea can form a picture or imagine at all the unrelax- 
ing toil and strain aboard these ocean outposts that link 
northern with southern climes and draw their invisible 
barrier across the waters. The sea, if you would traf- 
fic with her, demands a vigilance such as no landsman 
dreams of, but here you have men who to the vigilance 
of the mariner have added that of the scout, who to 
the sailor's task have added the sentry's, and on an ele- 
ment whose moods are in ceaseless change, to-day bright 
as the heavens, to-morrow murky as the pit. 

To this rough duty in northern seas what greater 
contrast than that other in southern, the naval bombard- 
ment of the Dardanelles? How broad and various the 
support given by the British fleet to the Allies can thus 
be judged. Separated each from the other by some thou- 
sands of miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, 
kept, every ship, its lonely watch, while the bombarding 
vessels, concentrated in imposing strength, attempted to 
force a passage through a channel, the most powerfully 
protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in 
the grand manner of the old and vanished days when 
war had still something of romance, and was less the hide- 
ous thing it has become. 

We have here at least a standard by which to measure 
the doings of Britain on the sea. For remember the at- 
tempt upon the Dardanelles, with all the strength and 
energy displayed in it, must be thought of as no more than 
a minor episode in the work of the Navy, not in any way 

57 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

vital to the great issue. It was not the first nor even the 
second among the tasks allotted to it. For while, first 
and chief, the great vessels under the Commander-in- 
Chief paralyzed the activities of the whole German Navy, 
while, second in importance, the cruising patrols held all 
the doors of entrance and exit to the German ports, still 
another fleet of great battleships remained free to conduct 
so daring an adventure as the attempt upon the Darda- 
nelles. Nor was this all, for, when the unsupported fleet 
could do no more, another heroic undertaking was planned 
upon which Fortune beguilingly smiled — the landing on 
the historic beaches of Gallipoli. 

Take, first, the attempt of the ships upon the Straits. 
In the light of failure no doubt it must be written down a 
military folly. Ships against forts had long been held a 
futile and unequal contest. But it was not the forts that 
saved Constantinople. In the narrow gulf leading to the 
Sea of Marmora no less than eight mine fields zigzagged 
their venomous coils across the channel. The strong, un- 
changing current of the Dardanelles, flowing steadily 
south, carried with it all floating mines dropped in the 
upper reaches. Torpedo tubes ranged on the shore dis- 
charged their missiles halfway across the Straits. Before 
warships could enter these waters a lane had to be swept 
and kept. Daily, therefore, the mine-sweepers steamed 
ahead of the fleet to clear the necessary channel. But 
when thus engaged they became the target of innumerable 
and hidden guns, secluded among the rocks, in gullies and 
ruins and behind the shoulders of the hills, in every fold 

58 



BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT 

of the landscape. To "spot" these shy, retiring batteries 
was of course imperative, but when spotted they vanished 
to some other coign of vantage, equally inconspicuous, 
and continued to rain fire upon the mine-sweepers. The 
warships poured cataracts of shell along the shores and 
among the slopes, the sea trembled and the earth quaked. 
Amid the devastating uproar the trawlers swept and 
grappled and destroyed the discovered mines, but almost 
as fast as they removed them others were floated down to 
fill their places. Ships that ventured too far in support of 
the sweepers, like the Bouvet and the Triumph, perished; 
the waterways were alleys of death. Progress, indeed, was 
made, but progress at a cost too heavy, and wisdom de- 
creed the abandonment of the original plan. 

There remained another way. An army landed on the 
peninsula might cross the narrow neck of land, demolish 
the batteries and free the mine-sweepers from their de- 
structive fire. Could that be done, it was thought the 
ships might yet force a passage into the broader waters and 
approach within easy range of the Turkish capital. After 
long and fatal delay the attempt was made. What might 
have been easily accomplished a month or two earlier 
had increased hour by hour in difficulty. Warned in good 
time of the coming danger the Turks converted Gallipoli, 
a natural fortress, into a position of immeasurable strength. 
With consuming energy, in armies of thousands, they 
worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground 
commanding a landing-place was trench or rifle pit or 
gun emplacement. An impenetrable thicket of barbed 

59 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

wire ran up and down and across the gullies, stretched to 
the shore and netted the shallow waters of the beach it- 
self. Then when all that man could do was done they 
awaited the British attack in full confidence that no army, 
regiment, or man could land on that peninsula and live. 

No more extraordinary venture than this British landing 
on a naked beach within point-blank range of the most 
modern firearms can be read in history or fable. It was a 
landing of troops upon a foreign shore thousands of miles 
from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without ab- 
solute command of the sea it could not have been so much 
as thought of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water 
had to be conveyed in ships and disembarked under the 
eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed, alert, and behind 
almost impregnable defences. 

To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of 
sublime folly; to attempt it almost an incredible mad- 
ness; to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat 
divine. Though a thousand pens in the future essay the 
task no justice in words can ever be done to the courage 
and determination of the men who made good that land- 
ing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that 
the whole gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense 
nothing whatever. View it only as an exploit, a martial 
achievement, and it takes rank as the most amazing feat 
of arms the world has ever seen or is like to see. That at 
least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with the 
full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes 
upon the record immortal as the soul of man. And noth- 

60 



BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT 

ing could be more fitting than that an accomplishment 
which dims the glory of all previous martial deeds, which 
marks the highest point of courage and resolution reached 
by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried 
through by British, Irish and Colonial troops, represen- 
tative of the whole Empire under the guidance and pro- 
tecting guard of the British fleet. 

At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavour on 
Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no 
harbour had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came 
and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by 
classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon 
line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower of 
modern youth, and beyond them, nearer the harbour 
mouth, the long, projecting guns and towering hulls of the 
warships. On April 24 they sailed, while, amid tempests 
of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long proces- 
sion moved away, the bands of the French vessels played 
them to the Great Endeavour. There is no need to tell 
again the story of the arrival, the stupendous uproar of 
the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it staggered as 
they w r alked, the slaughter in the boats and on the bullet- 
torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the 
subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be 
told and retold while the world lasts. And now that all 
is over, the chapter closed, the blue water rippling undis- 
turbed which once was white with a tempest of shrapnel, 
the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon 
the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no 

61 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and 
treasure, there should, perhaps, mingle with our poignant 
regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it 
surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is 
so moulded that it can never cease to admire such doings, 
the more, perhaps, if victory be denied the doers. And 
here at least on the shell-swept beaches, among the rocks 
and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race 
wrote, never to be surpassed, one of the world's deathless 
tales. 



CHAPTER VII 

SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS — SAILORS AND SEA- 
MANSHIP 

The tradition of the British Navy is all in favour of 
close fighting, stern and decisive, in which her seamen, 
apart from the mere machines they handle, may display 
their old accustomed, unsurpassed hardihood. In such 
encounters, they fancy, their star must invincibly pre- 
vail. But the range of modern guns has thrust the com- 
batants far apart, widened more and more the gaps be- 
tween the ships engaged, and naval actions are now less 
contests between men than between iron mastodons, 
which belch destruction at each other across great spaces 
of intervening sea. Yet the human interest still clings 
and will always cling to the battles or incidents in which 
some touch of heroism or of pathos appears, some spiritual 
quality of splendid daring or invincible devotion showing 
through that soulless smoky clash of giant machinery'. One 
looks into the furious arena of modern battle to find where 
one can the unconquerable human spirit, still master of 
itself though the heavens themselves be rent. And single 
ship actions, more particularly, perhaps, those in which 
this human element is most easily perceived, or seems 
least obscured by the mighty engines it handles, attract 
more attention than their military importance warrants. 
For this reason are remembered such famous engagements 

63 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

as that of the Shannon and the Chesapeake, for instance, 
fought a hundred years ago, with their Old-World chiv- 
alry of challenges, "in all respects such as a gentleman 
might write," their punctilious preliminaries, their courte- 
sies of offering the first shot, and all the rest of the ancient 
graces which once humanized war; now a business in 
which the Furies so let loose the passions that, by compari- 
son, many of the Old-World battles seem hardly more than 
friendly tournaments in which fame or glory were the only 
stakes. Of such naval duels, where the point of honour was 
no less important than victory, we read no longer, but 
duels there have been, of which, perhaps, that between 
the Sydney and the Emden excited the liveliest interest, 
though others, like the engagement between the Carmania 
and the Cap Trafalgar, both armed merchantmen, more 
nearly reproduced the conditions of the older and better 
time. 

On November 9, 1914, the Sydney, steering for Co- 
lombo in the Indian Ocean, about fifty miles to the east 
of the Keelings, picked up a wireless message, "Strange 
warship off entrance." It was the last the Cocos station 
had time to send before a German landing party from the 
Emden destroyed the installation, but it was enough. Al- 
tering course at once, the Sydney made for the islands 
and sighted them two hours later. In a few minutes, the 
Emden, the long-sought and elusive raider, herself ap- 
peared — a welcome sight. She came out at great speed 
and lost no time in opening fire. Three times in the course 
of the first exchanges she hulled the British ship. The 

64 



N KEELING ISLAND 



17' 



iWL 



15 



IS 



TO 



EMOEN 



12 



SYDNEY 

9 30 

NOV 10.1914 



ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN 
H.M.A.S. SYDNEY & the EMDEN 



SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS 

Sydney's foremast range-finder was shot to pieces, her 
after-control platform wrecked, and a cordite fire started. 
Thus the Emden drew first blood, but the damage was 
not serious, and then came the Sydney's turn. For the 
rest of the engagement she gave all and took none. To- 
day speed is what the "weather gage" was in Nelson's 
time. The faster vessel in a modern action keeps what 
distance she pleases, chooses the range, selects the posi- 
tion she will. Racing at twenty-five or twenty-six knots, 
— thirty miles an hour, — the Sydney hurled broadside 
after broadside, first from port, then from starboard, then 
again from port, round after round of smashing fire from 
all her guns at little more than five or six thousand yards 
from her enemy. In the hour and forty minutes the fight 
lasted she covered fifty-six miles of sea. The German's 
case was piteous and without hope. About 11.20, steam- 
ing at nearly twenty knots, and finding no way of escape, 
she threw herself, with a terrific crash which killed the 
helmsman, on the shore of the North Keeling, and lay 
there a flaming wreck, more than a hundred and twenty of 
her crew already dead, and the rest with shocking wounds 
or dazed after that deluge of shell. No one who went on 
board the Emden remains in love with war, for all sick- 
ened at the sight. Nothing to please was there, only 
tangled masses of iron, bent and torn, or human bodies 
shattered beyond recognition. One is not surprised to hear 
that there was no cheering on the Sydney when she made 
Colombo Harbour with her cargo of wounded and sur- 
vivors. That touch of British humanity, which would 

65 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

have gone to Nelson's heart, was not a little appreciated 
by the German prisoners. 

The Carmania and the Cap Trafalgar were far better 
matched. There the British victory was fairly won by 
superior skill and seamanship, and owed nothing to engine 
power or mere weight of guns. If anything the Cap Tra- 
falgar had the advantage in armament, but failed to make 
the best use of it. One hears, and it touches the chord of 
romance, that the Carmania's crew were all for lying along- 
side the enemy and boarding with cutlasses after the an- 
cient fashion of their forefathers, but the captain saw a 
better way. Firing a single unaimed shot as a summons 
to surrender, he was met by a full broadside of the Ger- 
man guns. But the surprise failed, for the aim was de- 
fective and the shells flew over the British ship. For the 
first quarter of an hour the German fired four or five shots 
to the Carmania's one, a rapid but nervous fusillade, to 
which the deadly answer came in the form of deliberate, 
methodical pounding of the Cap Trafalgar's hull. No wild 
shooting was there. Manoeuvring his ship with great dex- 
terity so as to present always only his bow or stern — the 
smallest target — to his enemy, and employing his fore 
or aft guns as the position demanded, within twenty min- 
utes the British captain put matters clean out of doubt. 
The German smoked from stern to stern and the flames 
spread like lightning. Then she bethought herself of flight, 
but the moment was past. An ominous list to starboard 
was already apparent and slowly increased till her funnels 
drank the sea. Two dull explosions followed, her stern 

66 



SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS 

mounted high above the waves, and bow foremost the 
Cap Trafalgar bade good-bye to the sunlight and vanished 
in the swirling eddies. Her crew had more anxious thought 
for their lives than for victory, hope of which they early 
relinquished. Before their vessel sank they had crowded 
into the boats, and all who thus abandoned the ship were 
picked up by the colliers in attendance. 

Many things happen in the North Sea of which the 
world, including the Germans, is ignorant. There are com- 
ings and goings, full of surprising interest, foreseen and 
unforeseen incidents, titanic labours and cheerful hu- 
mours. A corner of the veil lifts at times to disclose a little 
history like this: A fast British squadron is out on an ad- 
venture, no matter what. Two or three hundred miles 
from home, exact locality not stated, but within, let us 
say, thirty miles of Germany, the adventure is about to 
be launched, when inside five minutes, with that incred- 
ible perversity which distinguishes these waters, a yellow 
fog of city density blots out every ship from every other. 
Does any landsman guess how manoeuvring signals are to 
be made in such a case unknown to the enemy? They 
must be made. Shrieking sirens advertise your affairs, 
wireless shouts to every German ship and station that you 
are in the neighbourhood. Yet signals you must have, and 
in the perilous turning movements which followed some 
were missed. Ship groped for ship, and, seeking blindly 
in narrow circles, a destroyer that had lost touch found 
herself clean under the bows of a cruiser. The inevitable 
crash followed, and instantly the recoiling ships losl sighl 

67 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

of each other. There was time to see and hear, nothing 
more. The damaged destroyer not only disappeared in the 
darkness, she could not anywhere be found. Hour after 
hour of straining, desperate search failed to locate her. A 
whole day and half the night, in German waters remem- 
ber, passed before she was recovered, and in what a plight! 
Her crumpled bows "had fallen off into the sea, so that 
from another ship one could look right into her and see her 
storerooms and other compartments, whilst the muzzle of 
her foremost gun, at ordinary times twenty feet or so back 
from her bows, now protruded over the 'front' of the 
ship like a tree out-growing from a cliff. The men's living 
spaces right forward had retired to the bottom of the 
North Sea, and the waves were rolling in unhindered 
against the capstan engine, anchor chain lockers, and fore- 
most men decks." But she was still afloat! One trusty 
bulkhead held. You cannot tow a ship by the bows if she 
has no bows. She must be towed somehow but evidently 
otherwise. You cannot launch a boat to get a hawser 
aboard, for the sea is too heavy. Six hours of feverish work 
followed. Casks were towed past the wreck with wires 
attached till one was picked up, but every hawser parted 
soon after it was made fast. Then, thirty-six hours after 
the accident, to the accompaniment of wind, heavy seas, 
and a couple of snowstorms, firmly grappled to a cruiser, 
she was brought three hundred miles or so into a British 
harbour. There you have seamanship. 

In this strangest of all wars in which steamers have been 
captured by seaplanes, airships by destroyers, in which 

68 



SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS 

submarines have been destroyed by aircraft and infantry 
attacked from above by their machine-gun fire, any won- 
der seems possible. We have supped full of astonishments 
as well as horrors and the flights of romantic imagination 
are outdone. Courage, audacity, nerve hardly any longer 
surprise us, they seem universal, the possession not of sin- 
gle, exceptional men, but of the race itself. For wherever 
she may have failed Britain of a surety has not failed in 
men. And if there be anything upon which humanity can 
congratulate itself in these days of insensate destruction, 
there stands first and preeminent the revelation of amaz- 
ing courage and endurance not to be matched in any pre- 
vious record. The men of to-day, measure them by what 
standard you will, outshine in their achievements the men 
of all previous times. The virtues on which Homer proudly 
dwells in his heroes look pale beside the virtues of the sol- 
dier in the ranks, the simple merchant seaman, the volun- 
teer from the desk in service afloat or ashore. Hector and 
Achilles must yield pride of place to more splendid exem- 
plars. For if hateful inhumanity has degraded some men 
to the level of the brute, superb self-devotion has no less 
certainly raised others to angelic heights. 

The world will not easily forget the fortitude of the 
Captain and Commander of the Formidable, lost in the 
Channel on that terrible New Year's Day of 1915, the un- 
shaken Loxley, a typical figure, standing to the last on the 
forebridge of his sinking ship, with his old terrier Bruce by 
his side, smoking a cigarette, unruffled as if in harbour, 
while he directed the launching of the boats — "Steady, 

69 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

men, keep cool and be British," not forgetting in his last 
words praise of the Lieutenant who had got the boats 
smartly away — "You have done very well, Simmonds." 
Worthy of his place in the story, too, was William Pillar, 
master of the smack Providence, who, with his little crew 
of three and an apprentice lad, saved seventy men of the 
Formidable in that raging gale by sheer pluck and seaman- 
ship of which only his fellows can rightly judge — "beyond 
all praise " said the officer in charge of the rescued cutter. 
The Providence, herself running for shelter, had been 
forced to heave to, so great was the weight of wind, when 
right under her lee she sighted the ship's boat riding to a 
sea anchor and smothered in foam, the men bailing hard 
to keep her afloat. 

Captain Pillar swung the Providence clear. The crew, with 
almost superhuman efforts, took another reef in the mainsail 
and set the storm jib, for until that had been done it would have 
been disastrous to attempt a rescue. Meanwhile the cutter drifted 
toward them, although at times they lost sight of her in the heavy 
sea. Clark climbed the rigging and presently discovered her brav- 
ing the storm just to leeward of his boat. The Captain decided to 
gybe — a perilous manoeuvre in such weather since the mast was 
liable to give way. Four times did the gallant smacksmen seek to 
get a rope to the cutter. Each effort was more difficult than the 
last, but in the end they obtained a good berth on the port tack. 
A small warp was thrown and caught by the sailors. This they 
made fast round the stern of the capstan, and with great skill 
the cutter was hauled to a berth at the stern. The warp was 
brought round to the leeside and the cutter brought up to the lee 
quarter. Then the naval men began to jump on board; but even 
now there was a danger of losing men as the seas were rising some 
thirty feet at times. The rescues from the cutter to the smack 
took thirty minutes to accomplish. 

70 



SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS 

During the height of the storm for eleven hours the boat 
had been almost continuously engulfed by great seas. Such 
men as Pillar and his mates are of the true sea-dog breed, 
before whose magnificence the glory of kings and princes 
withers away. 

Of adventurous gallants many a one and bold mariners 
the talcs will be told when men have time to take their 
breath and write, — tales from Jaffa and Beyrut, from the 
Persian Gulf, from Dar-es-Salam and Duala; of the relief- 
ships struggling up the Tigris and the heroic sacrifices of 
men like Cookson; of the whalers in Sudi Harbour under 
the fire of four-inch guns; of the fighting on Nyassa or 
Lake Tanganyika, where two British motor-boats cap- 
tured the armed steamer Kingani after an action lasting 
ten minutes; of the great naval gun transported seven hun- 
dred miles to the siege of Garua, in the Cameroons, one 
hundred and sixty miles up the Niger, four hundred up the 
Benue River; of the blocking of the Rufigi, by sinking the 
coal steamer, Newbridge, to imprison the Konigsberg, 
under the fire of maxims at short range; of the destruction 
of the German by monitors as she lay hid in the jungle with 
branches lashed to her masts as a disguise; of armed guards 
on board blockade-runners in thick weather; of landings on 
the Syrian coast to cut telegraphs and railways; of the 
North Sea trawlers far from their proper homes, rolling 
and staggering along in the far /Egean; of the panting tug- 
boats dragging rows of lighters from Malta to tin- C\ Hades 
— the thousand and one tales, all of which have their 
place in the history of the Navy in the Great War. It is a 

71 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

very proud service, the British Navy, and it has certain 
reasons for its pride. Where is one to look for a more pic- 
turesque or romantic record than the history of this close- 
knit brotherhood of the sea? 



CHAPTER VIII 
BRIDGING THE SEAS 

There arc navies and navies. The old and fighting Brit- 
ish Navy, whose representatives keep the seas to-day 
against the King's enemies, has been heard of once or 
twice during the present war, but for the most part pre- 
serves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from 
the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older 
navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has 
done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or 
eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England 
still, has come to life again the Elizabethan mariner, who 
took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in 
his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth 
could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no 
other nation possessed, these men, bred to the sea and the 
risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred 
by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, 
answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. 
From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the 
Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might 
be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds, or the Dogger 
Bank — three thousand officers and some two hundred thou- 
sand men — to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the water- 
ways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies 
of the Alliance, and, incidentally, to show the world, what 

73 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

it had perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their 
fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but 
by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a 
very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and 
the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service, 
which was already old before the word "Admiralty" was 
first employed, which made its own voyages and fought 
its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and be- 
fore even that considerable event. These travel- worn ships 
form the solid bridge across which flow in unbroken files 
the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts. 
Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a 
track four or five thousand miles in length, curving from 
Archangel in Russia to Alexandria in Egypt, a track which 
touches on its way the coasts of Norway, of the British 
Isles, of France, of Portugal, of Spain, of Italy, of Greece. 
Picture from this immense arc of communication branch 
lines longer still, diverging to America, to Africa, to India, 
knitting the ports of the world together in one vast rail- 
way system. That railway system, with its engines and 
rolling stock, its stations and junctions, its fuel stores and 
offices, over which run daily and nightly the wagon-loads 
of food, munitions, stores for a dozen countries at war 
with the Central Powers, is a railroad of British ships. 
To dislocate, to paralyze it Germany would willingly give 
a thousand millions, for the scales would then descend in 
her favour and victory indubitably be hers. For consider 
the consequences of interruption in that stream of traffic. 
Britain herself on the brink of starvation, her troops in 

74 



BRIDGING THE SEAS 

France, in Egypt, in Salonica, cut off without food, with- 
out ammunition, unable to return to their homes. But for 
this fleet that bridges the seas Britain could not send or 
use a single soldier anywhere save in defence of her own 
shores. India, Australia, Canada, all her dependencies 
would be cut off from the Mother Country, the bonds of 
Empire immediately dissolved. Some little importance, 
tin n, may be attached to this matter of bridging the water- 
ways, and some admiration extended toward the men who 
do it and the manner of the doing. 

If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evi- 
dence of a French writer in Le Temps: — 

If at the beginning of the war we were enabled to complete the 
equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not been one of 
the least surprises of the German Staff, we owe it to the fleet which 
has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of horses. 
They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of 
wool and of raw material for our metal industries. We applied to 
the stock-breeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and 
cloth, the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption 
of meat threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are en- 
abled to avoid the danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. 
For the present situation the mastery of the sea is not only an ad- 
vantage, but a necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part 
of our coal area is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command 
of the sea by England would involve more than her own capitula- 
tion. She, indeed, would be forced to capitulate through starva- 
tion. But France also and her new ally, Italy, being deprived of 
coal and, therefore, of the means of supplying tluir factories and 
military transport, would soon be at the mercy of their adver- 
saries. 

On this command of the sea rests, then, the whole mili- 
tary structure of the Alliance. It opposes to Germany and 

75 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

her friends not the strength of a group of nations, each 
righting its own battle, separate and apart, but the strength 
of a federation so intimately knit together as to form a 
single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible 
resources of the world. Thus the British Navy rivets the 
Great Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, 
Operations whose breadth and scope beggar all description, 
since they span the globe itself. As for the men and the 
spirit in which they work, let him sail on a battleship, a 
tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is always the 
same, much as he has been since the world first took his 
measure in Elizabeth's days. 

"Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors." 

A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the 
child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cun- 
ning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost 
like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that 
fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, for- 
tunes, shipwreck, if tjt come, or battle, are but the inci- 
dents of a chequered day, and his part merely to "carry 
on" in the path of routine and duty and the honourable 
tradition of his calling. Manifestly his present business is 
epic and the making of epic, if he knew it, yet not knowing 
it he grasps things, as the epic paladins always grasp them, 
by the matter-of-fact, not the heroic, handle. What better 
stories have the poets to tell than that of Captain Parslow, 
a Briton if ever there was one, who, refusing to surrender, 
saved his ship in a submarine attack at the cost of his own 

76 



BRIDGING THE SEAS 

life? Mortally wounded as he stood on the bridge, the 

wheel was taken from the dying father's hand by his son, 
the second mate. Knocked down by the concussion of a 
sheil that gallant son of a gallant father still held to his 
post and steered the vessel clear. Or have they anything 
better to relate than the tale of the Ortega and Captain 
Douglas Kinneir, who, when pursued by a German cruiser 
of vastly greater speed, called upon his engineers and 
stokers for a British effort and drove his vessel under full 
steam, and a trifle more, into the uncharted waters of 
Nelson's Straits, "a veritable nightmare for navigators," 
the narrowest and ugliest of channels, walled by gloomy 
cliffs, bristling with reefs, rocks, overfalls and currents, 
through which, by the mercy of God and his own daring, 
he piloted his ship in safety and gave an example to the 
world of what stout hearts can do. It is such men Ger- 
many supposes she can intimidate! 

These are but episodes in the long roll of honour. You 
will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of mine- 
sweeping, or the search for mines — "fishing" the Navy 
calls it — that the impartial German scatters to trip an 
enemy, perhaps a friend, — an equal chance and it mat- 
ters not which, — an occupation for humanitarians and 
seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a 
thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have 
been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant 
Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his 
life and undisturbed continued to command his group of 
sweepers. On that day near Christmas-time they blew 

77 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as inci- 
dents within the passage of ten crowded minutes, his 
own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a 
third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea 
history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths 
of peace, from the letter of an officer: "Things began to 
move rapidly now. There was a constant stream of reports 
coming from aloft. 'Mine ahead, Sir'; 'Mine on the port 
bow, Sir ' ; ' There is one, Sir, right alongside ' ; and on look- 
ing over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the 
surface and so close that we could have touched it with a 
boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the mine- 
sweepers, which had already started work." 

One may judge of these North Sea activities from the 
record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve, who, 
besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or 
fifty mines; twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube; 
attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin; twice rescued 
a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June 
the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men ; also the crew 
of a sunk fishing vessel; in July assisted two steamers that 
had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in 
September assisted another steamer, rescued three men 
from a mined trawler; towed a disabled Dutch steamer, 
and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November as- 
sisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, 
and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed, and 
rescued forty. 

Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least 

78 



BRIDGING THE SEAS 

fascinating record will be that of men who, perhaps, 
never fired a shot, but who enlarged their vision of the 
recesses of the enemy mind in other ways and met his 
craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed 
by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered 
down the Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on 
their first command, or saw with their own eyes things they 
had believed to be fables. 

\Ye travel about a thousand miles a week, most of it in practically 
unknown seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose 
existence even is unknown. And by way of making things still 
more difficult we keep meeting floating islands. 

I always thought these things were merely yarns out of boys' 
adventure books. However, I have seen five, the largest about 
the size of a football field. They are covered with trees and palms, 
some of them with ripe bananas on them. They get torn away 
from the swampy parts of the mainland by the typhoons, which 
are very frequent at this time of year. 

The story of these things cannot be written here; it 
will fill many volumes. Here an attempt has been made 
to sketch merely in its broadest outlines some of the ac- 
tivities of British sailors during the greatest of wars. What- 
ever the future historian will say of the part they bore, he 
will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter 
turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. 
He will affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost 
negligible compared with the soldiers who fought in the 
long series of land battles, the sailors held the central 
avenues, the citadel of power. 

If it be possible in a single paragraph, let us set before 
our eyes the work of the British Navy and its auxiliaries 

79 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

during these loud and angry years. Let us first recall the 
fact that, besides the protection of Britain and her de- 
pendencies from invasion, together with the preserva- 
tion of her overseas trade, to the Navy was entrusted a duty 
it has fulfilled with equal success, the protection of the 
coasts of France from naval bombardment or attack — no 
slight service to Britain's gallant ally. Behind this barrier 
of the British fleet she continued to arm and munition 
her armies undisturbed. Recall, too, the French colonial 
armies as well as our own overseas troops, escorted to the 
various seats of war — more than seven million men — ■ 
the vital communications of the Allies, north and south, 
secured, the supplies and munitions — seven million tons 
— carried over the seas, a million and a quarter horses and 
mules embarked, carried, and disembarked, the left wing 
of the Belgian force supported in Flanders by bombard- 
ment, the Serbian army transferred to a new zone of war, 
and last, if we may call last what is really first and the mas- 
tering cause of all the rest, Germany's immense navy 
fettered in her ports. Bring also to mind that fifty or 
sixty of her finest war-vessels have been destroyed, be- 
sides many Austrian and Turkish, five or six million tons 
of the enemy's mercantile marine captured or driven to 
rust in harbour, her trade ruined, a strict blockade of her 
ports established which impoverishes day by day her in- 
dustrial and fighting strength, hundreds of thousands of 
Germans overseas prevented from joining her armies, her 
wireless and coaling stations over all the world and her 
colonial empire, that ambitious and costly fabric of her 

80 



BRIDGING THE SEAS 

dreams, cut off from the Fatherland and brought help- 
lessly t<> the ground. 

When all this has been passed in review dwell for a mo- 
ment on the matter reversed — but for the British fleet 
Germany's will would now be absolute, her Emperor the 
master of the world. 

There, briefly stated, you have the record of the Brit- 
ish Navy's work, an achievement to which we stand too 
near for full appreciation, but to which men of the genera- 
tions to come will look back with an amazed bewilderment 
and admiration. No soothsayer can inform us how the 
mighty debate will end, but of one thing we can inform our- 
selves — Britain has always placed the sea first in her 
affections, Germany has given it the second place. But she 
is a jealous mistress, and the faithful lover, as in the great 
and old romances, will come to his own. 



CHAPTER IX 

NAVIES AND ARMIES — WHAT THE BRITISH 
NAVY HAS DONE FOR THE WORLD 

Nothing is more natural than to compare the policy of 
a naval with that of a military state, the deeds of navies 
with those of armies. And if Britain be compared with 
Germany, the British Navy with the German Army, two 
questions inevitably arise. One asks first, "How does a 
naval power differ from a military power?" and second, 
"May not a great fleet be as powerful an instrument of 
tyranny as a great army, is 'navalism, ' that is, any less of 
a danger to the world than militarism?" To answer these 
questions we must go to history, and history answers in 
these words: Unlike military strength naval strength has 
this peculiarity — you may call it even a disability — 
that it cannot enslave, cannot subjugate the people against 
•whom it is directed. Since Salamis broke Xerxes and the 
Persian power, fleets have often been a bulwark of liberty, 
whereas armies have constantly been the instruments of 
tyranny. Has any one yet heard of a Nero, a Caesar, 
a Napoleon of the seas? History teems with examples of 
whole populations trodden under foot by hostile armies; 
never, for it is impossible, by hostile navies. A navy can- 
not interfere with the internal economy of any state, with its 
laws or customs, its religion or government. It cannot in the 
very nature of things overrun and destroy. Fleets do not 

82 



NAVIES AND ARMIES 

climb mountains, occupy cities, or pass nations under the 
yoke of bondage. How often have conquering armies laid 
lands desolate, set up new kingdoms, overturned the an- 
cient government and legal system, established, as did the 
Turks, a new religion at the edge of the sword. All these 
things, and worse things than these, have been the work 
of military monarchs, who, as readers of history well know, 
not once or twice, but a thousand times, have made a 
desert of a smiling countryside, burned, despoiled, dev- 
astated, driven whole populations into exile and left in 
the track of their destroying marches hardly a blade of 
grass in once fertile fields. The records of sea power can 
show no such deeds. On the contrary, they show that it has 
frequently curbed a tyrant's designs, arrested his ambitious 
progress, and set a limit to his destructive career. Sea 
power is an arresting and defensive, military power always 
an aggressive, force. When does sea supremacy become a 
danger? Only when it is an additional weapon wielded by 
a military state or despot. And when, one may well enquire, 
did the world become aware of Britain's tyrannous pro- 
ceedings on the sea? Not apparently till it was told by 
Germany! The nations were unconscious of the sufferings 
they endured until Germany unveiled to them the hideous 
facts. And when, until August, 1914, were the seas any- 
thing but free to Germany? 

I have travelled by German steamers [writes a neutral. Nils 
Stenj nearly all over the world, but never heard a German officer 
complain of England's naval supremacy. . . . For the last hundred 
years Norway has been England's greatest competitor on the 
When has Norway had reason to complain <>f England's jealousy 

83 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

or English supremacy? In all the harbours of the world the 
Norwegian and the English flag have been hoisted side by side. 
When have unfriendly feelings existed between these two coun- 
tries? Hundreds and thousands of times Norwegian boats have 
been lying within range of English guns. Have they felt this as 
danger? No, on the contrary, they have felt it as a guarantee for 
just and noble treatment! 

And does any one believe that were the naval situation 
reversed, were Germany as strong by sea as she is by land, 
that this ruthless power, that has trampled Belgium under 
foot and carried fire and sword through Serbia and deso- 
lated Poland, would treat more generously than Britain 
the rights of powerless neutrals at sea? "Look how you 
suffer," she cries to the neutral states, "under the oppres- 
sive sea-tyranny of England. Join with me in a holy cru- 
sade against the despot." But what delirium is this and in 
what lunatic world do we find ourselves? The champion 
of freedom appeals to neutral states and inaugurates her 
sacred campaign by sinking, careless of the safety of their 
crews, three or four hundred peaceful vessels belonging to 
these states; and not, observe, vessels touching at British 
ports alone, but as in the case of the Blommersdijk, neu- 
tral vessels trading between neutral ports! This logic 
passes human understanding; it is super-logic and dazes 
the intellect of all but super-men. The philosophers of the 
future must be left to deal with it. 

Not, then, till the outbreak of war with England did 
Germany herself discover and proclaim the abomination 
of naval power. The greatest of authorities, Admiral Ma- 
han, not a prejudiced Englishman, but a disinterested 

84 




/ - 

"■■ w 
m 

N 

- - 



NAVIES AND ARMIES 

American, takes a different view. The instincts of naval 
power, he tells us, are "naturally for peace because it has 
so much at stake outside its shores." And if Britain in the 
past has hoisted her flag in every region of the globe is there 
nothing to set out in her favour? At least many of her 
colonies are now, with the full consent of the mother 
country-, independent and self-governing states free to 
mould as they will their own destinies. "Why," asked 
Admiral Mahan, "do English innate political conceptions 
of popular representative government, of the balance of 
law and liberty, prevail in North America from the Arctic 
Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pa- 
cific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era 
belonged to Great Britain." And when the judges are upon 
their seats, may one not recite to them the services of her 
fleet to the world in opening up during the infancy of navi- 
gation the ocean routes to voyagers from all the states, 
by men, "who thought it a thing more divine than human 
to sail by the West into the East," adding to the immor- 
tal names and deeds of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and 
Dutch sailors names and deeds hardly less famous — 
Humphrey Gilbert, who, at the height of the storm in which 
he perished, cried out, "We are as near to heaven by sea 
as by land"; the fearless Davis, who gave his name to the 
Straits, and wrote of the seaman that noble sentence of 
praise, "By his exceeding great hazards the form of the 
earth, the quantities of countries, the diversity o\ nations, 
and the nature of zones, climates, countries, and people, 
are made known to us"; Hudson, of Hudson's Bay; Tap- 

85 



THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR 

tain Cook, who first crossed the Arctic Circle, and Parry 
and Ross and Franklin and many another to whom all gen- 
erations owe an unceasing debt? And when the charges 
against Britain's misuse of sea power are formulated, not 
preferred, as Germany prefers them, in vague, incoherent 
cries of anger, may it not be remembered what her Navy 
has done to free and police the seas, to establish a chivalrous 
tradition of fellowship among the members of that gallant 
company who go down to the sea in ships and do their 
business in the great waters, to sound the deeps and chart 
the channels and direct the mariner on his way? 

The seas were not always free. For centuries they were 
the hunting ground of buccaneers, filibusters, pirates, slave- 
dealers, marauders of every type. There is no nation which 
has done as much, or half as much, for the security of 
travellers by water as Britain. Take the state of the Medi- 
terranean only a hundred years ago when a squadron 
under Lord Exmouth destroyed the last stronghold of the 
Barbary corsairs, long the terror of that inland sea, who 
had for generations seized the trading vessels of all nations 
and massacred or made slaves of their unhappy crews. By 
that expedition alone two thousand Christian captives 
were set free, and "many a merchant sailor for many a year 
after blessed the name of Lord Exmouth." So runs the 
history of the British Navy in the days of peace. But add 
to this that expeditions almost without number have been 
despatched not only against such common foes of mankind 
as the slave-dealer or the pirate, as for purposes of ocean 
survey and sounding, of collecting geographical and scien- 

86 



NAVIES AND ARMIES 

tific knowledge of oceans, coasts, ice tracks, tides, currents. 
Add again to these services the publication of Bailing direc- 
tions for the waterways of all the world, to be found on 
vessels flying every flag, and the work of the British Ad- 
miralty in peaceful times must be acknowledged as un- 
paralleled, a glory not to Britain only, but to humanity 
whom it has so universally and nobly served. 



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